A Hideous Beauty

by Jack Cavanaugh

  “Students will be coming in soon,” the professor said. “Walk with me.”

  On any other day I would have found humor in a man in a wheelchair saying, Walk with me. But at the moment, nothing was funny.

  “Did you feel that?” I exclaimed. “That jolt of energy when he . . . when he . . .”

  Two coeds passed us walking in the opposite direction. They greeted the professor. Their perfume billowed around them like a cloud, a nice scent, but definitely overdone.

  With other students within earshot, I whispered, “. . . when he disappeared.”

  The professor led me on a circuitous route through campus hallways so that I had no idea where we were until we emerged in a spacious quad with a desert garden at one end. We had come a complete circle and were on the outside of the library windows. “We can talk here,” the professor said, pulling to a stop in front of a slatted wooden bench.

  I sat facing him. In spite of the events in the library, the morning showed promise. Everything was fresh. The sky. Spring colors. The air. It was shaping up to be a nice day.

  “Tell me you felt it,” I said, “that surge of energy, wasn’t that something?” I felt invigorated, like I could run a marathon and not be winded. And I hated jogging.

  The professor looked at me with sad eyes. “No, Grant, I didn’t feel it.” I must have looked at his paralyzed legs, because he added, “And neither did Sue Ling. Only you.”

  “What are you saying? How could you miss it? It’s like saying you didn’t feel an 8.0 earthquake.”

  It took him a moment to find the words. “Do you remember when you first came here, and you told me what you’d experienced in that teacher’s office . . .”

  “Myles Shepherd’s office.”

  “Do you recall what I said then? I said, ‘Why you?’ ”

  I remembered, and I told him so.

  “I know the answer to the question now,” he said.

  Why did I think this wasn’t going to be a good thing? Possibly because good news is shouted, it isn’t something shared in some out-of-the-way garden by someone with the expression of an undertaker.

  “From that look on your face I wasn’t selected because of my natural wit and charm.”

  Despite himself and the apparent weight of the news, the professor smiled. “Grant, you were selected because you’re one of them.”

  I waited for the punch line.

  There wasn’t one.

  I said, “Professor, I don’t even believe in angels.”

  “Despite what you just saw? What you just felt?”

  He had me there. I just saw a grown man vanish. I just felt the equivalent of a carton of energy drinks.

  “To put it in understandable terms, you have angel blood in you. You’re part angel. One quarter to be exact. Your grandfather was . . .”

  I was on my feet but didn’t remember standing up. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but you’re not going to pull me into your fantasy world. What is this? Some kind of variation of Dungeons & Dragons where we each assume mystical powers? Or are we pretending this is Middle Earth? Let me guess . . . you’re Gandalf, right? You look like you’d be a Gandalf.”

  I was rambling. I couldn’t help myself. I was scared.

  Sue Ling stood solemnly in the library window watching us.

  “You told her, didn’t you? That’s why she acted like she did. You told her I was some sort of freak. Part human, part ED. Isn’t that what she calls them? Extradimensionals? Well, you’re wrong, Professor. I have trouble enough with three dimensions, I don’t need more.”

  The professor persisted. “The extreme reaction you had to Semyaza when he revealed himself to you, the charge of energy you felt just now . . . Grant, a part of you vibrates in tune with heavenly—”

  “Shut up!” I shouted. “Just . . . just . . . shut up, will you? I need to think.”

  Only I couldn’t. This was so utterly ridiculous . . . so far out in left field . . . so crazy . . . I should be laughing at the absurdity of it all. But I wasn’t. Why wasn’t I laughing?

  “I’m outta here,” I said.

  I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t even want to look at him any longer. All I wanted was to get away from here, from him, from all this talk of supernatural beings, or extradimensionals, or whatever you wanted to call them.

  I just wanted to be left alone.

  I stopped running when I couldn’t run any farther. It was either that or start swimming.

  The shores at La Jolla have always been a place of solace for me. There’s something seductive about the rhythm of the sea, it calms me and calls to me. The crashing of waves against the rocks, the colorful sea life in the tide pools, the ocean spray on my skin, these have always relaxed me, and they didn’t fail me now.

  As I drove out here over the Grossmont Summit my cell phone rang. I turned it off without looking to see who was calling. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. When you talk to people you hear things you don’t want to hear, so I did the mature thing. I decided I would never talk to anyone ever again.

  “Who is feeding him this stuff?” I shouted at the waves. “That vanishing linebacker? I don’t know about you, but it’s been my experience you can’t believe a word a vanishing linebacker says.”

  The waves pummeled the rocky shoreline. Maybe that’s why they were soothing. They took your anger and aggression and slammed them against the rocks.

  Part angel. Big joke.

  Well, I knew one person who could set the record straight. My mother. Mothers know where their children come from.

  Thirty minutes later I was back in El Cajon on Mulgrew Street, where I grew up. The house looked uninhabited. The front yard was dead and parched, not even weeds were growing in it. The exterior paint was as weathered as Doc Palmer’s barn. A half-dozen newspapers had yellowed in the sun. The bedroom window facing the street was lined with tinfoil. There was no car in the driveway, only oil spots.

  I didn’t know what kind of reception to expect. Mother and I weren’t close. Her choice. We had barely spoken a dozen words to each other since I graduated from high school and moved out of the house. When I called to tell her I’d won the Pulitzer Prize, she hung up on me before I could say Pulitzer. When I was invited to speak at Singing Hills, I sent her an invitation. She didn’t respond. Didn’t attend.

  Even as I was knocking on the door, I hadn’t decided how I was going to broach the subject. How do you ask your mother if your grandfather was an angel?

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter.

  I never got the chance.

  The door opened just a crack, stopped by the security chain. Bleary eyes over sagging cheeks labored to focus. I almost didn’t recognize her at first, my own mother. Her hair was disheveled. She was still in her housecoat. Musty odors of a house shut up too long combined with whiskey poured through the opening.

  The first words out of my mother’s mouth when she recognized me was a curse, followed by, “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “Got nothing to say.”

  She started to close the door. I stopped it with my hand.

  “It’ll just take a moment. It’s about Grandpa Tall.”

  At the sound of my grandfather’s name her unfocused eyes quickened. She looked past me, as though she expected to see someone behind me.

  Tall Mann was my grandfather’s stage name. Born Ulysses William Austin, he made a living as an extra and stuntman. At six feet five he was an imposing figure and was often cast in the role of the Tall Man in the credits. It became a joke on the film lot, one he apparently didn’t mind because he began using it as his stage name, adding an extra n. So if you’re watching an old black-and-white western and you see in the credits, “ ‘Tall Man’ played by Tall Mann,” that’s my grandfather.

  I never knew him. Shortly after I was born, he drank himself to death—six months before my fat
her committed suicide.

  “I need to talk to you about Grandpa,” I repeated, since she hadn’t answered me the first time.

  Her eyes darted wildly, not only behind me, but above me, searching the sky. “You brought them with you, didn’t you?” she cried. She was beginning to panic.

  “I came alone, Mom,” I assured her. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “Go away!” she shouted.

  “Mom . . .”

  “Go away! Go away! Go away!” She leaned her shoulder against the door and tried to force it shut. The lack of weight she was able to put behind the effort was alarming.

  “Go away!” she sobbed.

  “Grandpa Tall,” I said. “Is there something I should know about him?”

  “Go away! Please, go away!”

  She was hysterical, pounding the door first with her fists to get it to close, then with her forehead, all the while weeping.

  I’ve seen her stinking drunk. I’ve seen her passed out on the sofa in her own mess. But I had never seen her like this.

  She slumped to the floor, her mouth twisted with grief. “Go away,” she pleaded.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Can I call someone?”

  “Go away . . .”

  “All right. I’m going.”

  I eased the door shut and heard her lock it and the dead bolt.

  For several minutes I stood on the doorstep. I didn’t want to leave her like this, but we didn’t have any relatives in the area I could call and I didn’t know her neighbors or friends.

  Making my way to the car, I determined I’d get the phone number of a local church and see if they had someone they could send to check up on her, possibly take her some food.

  I was just about to climb into the car when her front door flew open. In her pink slippers, her housecoat flying open to reveal a white silk nightgown, she came running out the door with an armload of liquor bottles which she proceeded to heave at me as though they were Molotov cocktails.

  The first bottle hit the top of the car, flew inches from my head, and shattered in the street. The second bottle came straight at my head. I ducked and heard it shatter as it hit the pavement.

  “Demon blood!” she shouted. “Demon blood!”

  I slipped into the car for my own protection. A bottle hit the passenger side window with more force than I thought she was capable of in her condition. The window spidered.

  My mother’s yelling brought several neighbors out of their houses. She threw the last bottle. It skipped across the hood of the car.

  The woman directly across the street, seeing my mother standing in her front yard screaming at me, shouted for someone inside to call the police, then ran to my mother and took her by the shoulders. But it was clear my mother wouldn’t be consoled until she could no longer see me.

  With the words demon blood ringing in my ears, I drove away.

  CHAPTER 20

  Memo to self: Don’t ask questions if you don’t want to know the answers.

  My mother’s voice shouting two words—demon blood—echoed in my head.

  Navigating the late morning, downtown traffic, I returned to the hotel thinking I’d wallow in self-pity until lunch, then call Jana and hold her to her end of the agreement. I had read the professor’s manuscript and had kept the meeting. Now I had a president to save.

  With the professor’s manuscript tucked under my arm, I slipped the key card into my hotel door and stepped into my room to find it occupied.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “I guess I don’t have to ask how you got in.”

  Seated comfortably at the table in the corner was the professor’s friend Abdiel.

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “I don’t.” He didn’t get up.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Orders.”

  “Orders? Someone ordered you to talk to me?”

  “My superiors.”

  For some reason that struck me as funny. I laughed.

  I laughed alone. Whoever or whatever he was, Abdiel sat on the room side of the round table within arm’s reach of my unmade bed. He’d turned the chair toward the door waiting for me. How long was anyone’s guess. If he really was a member of some sort of supernatural extradimensional alien race, he’d probably appeared the moment I slipped the key card into the slot.

  “Is Abdiel your last name?” I said. “What’s your first? Ed? Ed Abdiel. Has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

  My sarcasm generator had switched into overdrive, which meant I was afraid.

  He sat there straight-backed, in tan pants with the sharpest crease I’d ever seen, and a pale yellow, short-sleeved dress shirt. A massive neck bulged from the collar and muscular arms stretched down to the largest hands I’d ever seen which rested on the tops of his legs. His eyes were pale blue and his complexion nicely tanned.

  Apparently he was waiting for me to run out of sarcastic comments. He’d have to wait a long time. I was blessed with a lifetime supply.

  I tossed the professor’s manuscript at his feet. “Is that your handiwork? Did you dictate that to the professor?”

  He bent down and picked it up. He examined it, then placed it on the table behind him. “Yes,” he said.

  “And you expect me to believe that the events you described actually happened? That you are a veteran of a war in heaven?”

  “I don’t expect you to believe anything, nor am I here to convince you.”

  Folding my arms, I remained standing. I felt looking down on him gave me an advantage. To put it in Washington terms, I was in the power position. “Then why are you here?” I asked. “Exactly what are your orders?”

  “You have questions.”

  “The understatement of the century. How long do you have?”

  “An eternity.”

  I laughed. He had a sense of humor after all, you had to give him that.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s start with a simple one. Is the professor correct? Am I part angel?”

  “Yes.”

  The bluntness of his answer hit me harder than I wanted to admit, hard enough to knock me out of the power position. I sat on the bed.

  They were all in agreement. The professor. My mother. Now Mr. Eternity here. The whole universe seemed to know that I was part angel. But I knew that wasn’t true; some of the backwater planets hadn’t gotten the news yet.

  “All right . . .” I said. I nodded. Then nodded again. I was sucking air. “All right . . . all right . . .”

  This was going to take a while to sink in.

  “All right . . . um, next question . . .”

  The door latch rattled. The door opened. “Housekeeping . . .” A maid entered, her arms full of bedding. She was barely five feet tall, with a face that had seen a hard life.

  She hadn’t expected anyone to be in the room because when she looked up and saw us . . .

  Saw me.

  Abdiel had disappeared.

  “Sorry, señor,” she said. “I will . . .” She motioned to the hallway.

  “Give us . . . um, me . . .” I glanced at the empty table. “. . . about an hour.”

  Looking at the floor and backing out, she said, “I come back in hour.”

  The door closed.

  Abdiel was back in his chair as though he’d been there the entire time. His little disappearing trick was unnerving.

  “Isn’t that always the way?” I said. “Every time you’re interviewing an angel, the maid interrupts.”

  “Calynda is a good woman,” Abdiel said. “She works two jobs. Here and at a diner on Fifth Avenue. Did you notice her eyes? She’s worried about her two-year-old daughter, Nuria, who woke up last night with a fever. Calynda didn’t want to leave her, but she needs the money.”

  I cut him off with an upraised hand. “I get it,” I said. “No need to flash your credentials.”

  Abdiel looked at me with the expression of a disapproving schoolmaster. “Believe m
e, if I flashed anything, you’d know it.”

  A dozen quips like puppies in a box wanted to escape past my lips. I regret it now, but I swallowed them and returned to the subject at hand. “Question,” I said. “My grandfather, Grandpa Tall. Was he an angel?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “That’s it? Yes and no? Would you care to elaborate?”

  “I don’t care to do any of this. As I informed you, I am here only because—”

  “I know . . . I know . . . you were ordered to talk to me. So talk. Tell me about my grandfather.”

  “Yes, your grandfather is an angel. No, Ulysses William Austin was not an angel, nor was he your paternal grandfather. Reality is not what you think it is.”

  “That’s what everyone keeps telling me. So what is the reality of my birthright?”

  “It was born of scandal.”

  “Makes sense. Hollywood is the scandal capital of the world.”

  “Not even close,” Abdiel said. He didn’t elaborate. “You know about the fame of your grandmother.”

  I nodded. “Gigi Beaumont. Real name, Denise Garrett. Movie star. Gorgeous, if her publicity photos are to be believed. Witty. Talented. Would have eclipsed Esther Williams had she not died tragically soon after giving birth to my father.”

  “Do you know the details of her death?”

  “She died in an . . .” The next words caught in my throat. “. . . in an automobile accident.”

  “They like the convenience of car accidents to cover their tracks.”

  I narrated the incident by rote just as it had been handed down to me. “She attended a Hollywood party. Got tipsy. On her way home, she lost control of the car and drove over a cliff into a Hollywood ravine.”

  “That part is correct.”

  Abdiel sounded like a schoolmaster evaluating an assigned lesson. Didn’t he realize this was my life we were talking about?

  I continued. “The way I heard it, Grandpa Tall took her death hard. He isolated himself in a cabin, got drunk, and blew his head off with a shotgun.”

  “That part is only partially correct.”

  “Enlighten me,” I snapped, irritated by his attitude.

  “Ulysses Austin did indeed take his own life, but only after learning he was not the father of his wife’s child. The father was Azazel.”