Falling Idols

by Brian Hodge

  Hope is the carrot of many colors, dangling from the stick before us, and we terrestrial mules plod diligently along after our goals only occasionally wondering why we’re no closer. A good day is when we look up high enough to still enjoy the sun. A bad day is when we look lower and see how much the carrot has rotted.

  Hey. Hey. Let me tell you what magick isn’t. It’s not the conjuring of carrots out of nothing. It’s learning how to bend the stick.

  *

  That night in bed she made the first move and wasn’t coy about it, seizing Philippe and stuffing him inside her as soon as he was stiff. Gabrielle did most of the work, even when she rolled onto her back and pulled him around on top of her, shaking him by the shoulders and drumming him in the ass with her heels. It was all he could do to keep pace, never once seeming aware of how his body was being used to batter Austin out of her, her past, her thoughts, her cells.

  Philippe had been too long in America. A few years closer to France and he would’ve smelled Austin on her breath.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asked in the dark, afterward.

  “Occasion? We’re down to needing occasions now?”

  He began soothing her testiness, smooth palm along her hip beneath the sheets. “I’m only trying to remember the last time I went to work in the morning feeling sore down there.” Warm hand sliding down to cup her pubis. “I missed it and didn’t even know.”

  She sighed agreement. That was a good feeling. Wanton.

  “That ache right over the bone? I’ll feel it throb and then I’m not even where I really am. I can be looking someone in the face and they don’t have a clue most of me’s right back here.”

  It was sweet and carnal and dopey romantic, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d first heard it from another woman, before her. That made it easier to admit the totality of tonight’s failure. Some people you simply couldn’t screw out of your system.

  “Like magic,” she murmured.

  “Oui.” She felt him nod into her shoulder. “Like magic.”

  Philippe slipped off to sleep before she did — why tamper with custom? His breathing grew slow and deep, and soon began to catch in his throat, soft palate zigging when it should’ve been zagging. He began to click with wet glottal snorts.

  How quickly feelings could change once the brains were all banged out. Willing to die for him one minute, twenty more later ready to do the killing instead. Nothing messy, nothing sadistic. A soft pillow over the face. His was a face made for just such a murder, with a weak chin and a narrow forehead from which his hair was backing away. It would welcome the pillow, and the pressure.

  He touched her thigh in his sleep and it quieted him, then guilt drove her from the bed, the room. She stopped when she found herself standing nude before the living room window, tips of her breasts flattening against the glass. Maybe someone was watching, somewhere on the street or from another apartment; she hoped so.

  She raised a hand to her throat, experimenting with its fit, recalling another night’s suffocation. No pillows, just Austin’s hands. He had fingers suited for a pianist or a surgeon. He’d known how hard and how long to squeeze. No anger in it, only the lust for experience. She’d not really wanted him to but hadn’t forbade it either. The way it had amplified the orgasm she’d been on the verge of was terrifying, nearly turning what the French called la petit morte — the little death — from metaphor into reality. She’d enjoyed it so much that she knew she could never experience it again. Knew she could never do it to Austin because regardless of when she lifted her hands from his neck, he’d still believe she could’ve held on two or three seconds longer.

  Did you see anything? he’d asked.

  Stars, she’d told him.

  Gabrielle looked for them now, in the sky. Couldn’t find a single one. In Manhattan night came in name only, the darkness as unnatural as the light that stole away the stars. Empty sky above, empty streets below, the West Sixties.

  West. The Hudson River was west of here. So was New Jersey, the Newark airport. And then Utah. Go figure.

  Back in the bedroom, Philippe’s fitful breath had graduated to an all-out snore. As she recalled, Austin slept like the dead, but she’d always assumed that was because he envied them what they now knew.

  *

  Let me tell you about God.

  The kabbalists have a fundamental doctrine of belief that God is not a static being, but dynamic becoming. Process, as opposed to personage. I can accept this. It explains why so many prayers seem to come back markedReturn to sender.

  Sorry — God’s closed for renovation. Please try again next lifetime.

  *

  She had a window seat and a seatmate zoned on tranquilizers, thus all the privacy she wanted. Forsaking books and magazines in favor of memories and the patterns in the land 39,000 feet below. Farmland gridded in a dozen shades of green, the rich browns of fallow fields. Summer in the heartland. Easy to forget she’d been born somewhere down there between the oceans, enough years in New York by now to be entitled to the disdain of a native of either coast: flyover country, the interior … all state fairs, incest, and militias. A few more hours and she’d be wearing snobbery like a birthmark, outnumbered. People would point and snicker.

  She was really doing this. Clearing it with the magazine had been the easy part. Austin had told her to think of it as career-related so that was the tack she’d taken. Gabrielle’s editor-in-chief had heard her out with furrowed brow. The town of Miracle, Utah? Last year’s news. And maybe next month’s, she’d hinted. He signed the travel voucher. Do her good to shake out the carcinogens of the office, get in the trenches again, even if the best she came back with was a profile in mass hysteria and the desperate need to believe.

  After a glass or three of wine she could usually laugh at the contradiction of her day life: born-again agnostic masquerading as Religion Editor of Disclose. Oxymoronic, but no more so than the actual magazine — a less self-important monthly counterpart of the news weeklies, covering people, issues, and trends for those who doubted everything they read, but read it anyway if its layout was eye-grabbing enough. Media credibility had taken its hike long ago, so might as well flaunt it. Or as one wag had memoed, When it comes to respectability, we’re just dis close.

  And she was really doing this.

  Family aside, Austin was the only relic from her past with any guarantee of success at uprooting her, reeling her in from across the country like this. True, he was the only one who could infiltrate her mind and trick her eyes, but it was more than that. In her life, there had always been an Austin McCoy, and perhaps always would be. Pretending otherwise wasn’t going to cut it.

  Sweet friends as children, benignly indifferent strangers as adolescents, lovers as young adults, and finally a more malignant indifference for the past decade. Austin had always sought the inherent cycles in things. She wondered if he didn’t regard the last eleven years as the gestation preceding some new rebirth between them. Another rung up the evolution of their weird drama. Friends, lovers — what comes next? Nothing so mundane as exchanged vows, she was sure. He was hardly the marrying kind, and she was already there. Although he might enjoy the idea of making a bigamist of her. Been trying to damn himself for years. Maybe ritual adultery was something he hadn’t tried yet, but in that case he really must be creatively bankrupt by now.

  Thirty-nine thousand feet below, the docile green quilt of farmland gave way to less tameable ground. Forested hillsides and snow-capped peaks buckled out of the earth, rising toward the belly of the plane. Stone echoes of ancient cataclysm, continents in collision wreathed in clouds and scoured by winds.

  Somewhere on the other side they began their slow descent.

  *

  Let me tell you about wonder.

  The earliest scientists saw the world as comprised of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Ever the symbolists, they weren’t being literal. These four elements were the broadest categories for all that is and
all that lies within it, from matter to energy to force to potential.

  Binding it all together, they agreed, was the fifth element, the quintessence: spirit. Whatever it is, this is the one that still makes modern physics edgy even though its spokesmen agree that without it, we couldn’t exist. Our molecules would fly apart. Even the bulkiest of us, on a subatomic level, is mostly empty space. Head included.

  If spirit is the fifth element, then wonder has to be the sixth, because without it no one would ever have cared about naming the other five.

  Wonder comes naturally to a child, and when I was a boy, every day I found some new thing to wonder about: What I was made of. Why grass was green, sky was blue, blood was red. Why my neighbor and best friend Gabrielle had a body different from mine. And finally, one day, why I could not die.

  *

  She grew more appalled with every mile. Knew Utah was a spartan place, if here and there grand enough to film a western, but really: What had happened to Austin’s mind? Out this far he must be living as poorly as an Indian on a reservation.

  The town of Miracle — the area’s last stab at civilization — was behind her. A bizarre place, home to several hundred original residents or diehard newcomers. During its brief fame last year as a New Age mecca it had bloated and bustled with seekers after enlightenment, visions, or cures. Opportunists had been quick to capitalize. Moribund storefronts had been given new life, crystal sellers and self-styled healers and tacky bookshops affixing themselves to visitors’ hopes like ticks on a dog. Now they floundered. The dust was taking over again. On the sidewalks she could see the same faces she might find in any rust belt town whose factory whistle had blown for the last time.

  The hokeyness of it, the platitudinous kitsch … it was the last place on earth she’d expect to lure Austin.

  But three miles later and here she was — rough miles at that. The road wasn’t even paved. Dips in the hardpan pounded at the rental car’s wheels, while the windshield had begun to collect a powdery film of reddish-brown ochre. Tufts of scrub grew low to the ground, as cheerless and hardy as steel wool.

  In the distance it was all barren majesty, as far from everyday life as the dark side of the moon, and equally hospitable. Buttes and mesas and red craggy spires skewered the landscape, graven out of stone and left behind to challenge the vastness of pure sky. She might’ve found it beautiful on a movie screen, where men would shoot each other or die of thirst and collapse beside the bleached horned skulls of lost cattle. Great fun. But in real life it was a terrible place. She’d been a fool to come here. A bigger fool for listening to Austin in the first place. Ever.

  Gabrielle rounded a curve, a hill. Saw the shack before she saw him. Naturally — the shack was bigger. But not by much. Two rooms’ worth, hammered together ages ago from rough planks, all color baked out of them by the same sun whose gleam caught the bare metal of the stovepipe for an incandescent moment.

  He was sitting on the ground out front, one knee drawn up for him to lean on, other leg extended at an angle. Head down and a curtain of hair over his face: Austin, eleven years wiser, was he, or eleven years more deluded, self-destructed, and confused? In his hand a stick, but wherever he’d picked it up, it wasn’t here; not one tree in sight. If you needed to build a quick coffin you’d first have to dismantle living quarters.

  She slowed, wheeling off the road and following the scored tracks left by what she assumed was Austin’s car. She stopped but her dusty wake kept coming, a gritty drift of red, and she stayed put behind the wheel until it passed, obscuring Austin for the moment. Gabrielle soaked up the last of the a/c before turning off the engine and cursed the sun.

  The cloud thinned and Austin emerged from its murk. He hadn’t moved but it looked as though his body had refused the dust, or else the dust wanted nothing to do with him. For living in a sty, he looked remarkably clean, only weathered like the wood behind him.

  When she left the car he seemed not to notice, staring down at the ground before him instead, where he was using the tip of the stick to draw spirals in the dirt, from center outward with a clockwise twist. He’d draw one and wait, while she remained beside the rental, last link to normality. The air at the center of each spiral would shimmer like heat-haze on a horizon before coalescing into a tiny whirlwind. He would let it spin for a few moments, fattening on its own momentum, then bring down his other arm to snuff out the fledgling cyclone with his palm.

  His mind must be gone, she thought. He thinks he can draw tornadoes now. Gabrielle blinked a few times, left her eyes shut, and when she reopened them he’d tired of the game and she was no longer sure it was what she had really seen.

  Austin told her he was glad she’d come, nice to see her again after all this time, she was looking good. All the usual smalltalk suspects, except they sounded poised on the brink of mockery. Or was she projecting? She crossed arms and used a shoetip to drag a crude spiral in the dirt, and when nothing else happened kicked it out and nodded at the pathetic shack.

  “I’d hoped better for you, Austin, I really had.”

  “I know you must find it a Green Acres kind of shock, coming here,” he said. His raspy voice lilted up several notes: “‘Noo Yawk is where I’d rahther stay…’”

  “Austin? For future reference? When you act smug, first make sure you have something to be smug about.”

  “For instance? A marriage I’m starting to doubt, an apartment in a rent-controlled building, the title of Religions Editor at some magazine more people look at than actually read? Are those what you had in mind?”

  “Maybe it’s not much,” she said, clipped now, “but it’s my life.”

  Of all the things she didn’t need, it was for him to start looking at her with pity. Pity. Brown eyes going liquid with their wisdom and insight and compassion and lord knows what else, Austin thinking maybe now he looked like a black velvet Jesus.

  “I remember a Gabrielle,” he said, “who wanted to spend her life trying to scratch beneath its surface and understand what was really going on underneath.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I did. And you know what I found? Responsibility and bills. I found adulthood.”

  “But now,” he went on, as though he’d not heard her, “she just reports on other people’s lives. Or does she even do that much anymore? If she’s an editor, I guess that means she gets to let others do the reporting and she only decides what to print.”

  “At least I have a stack of magazines to show for it. What do you have?” Regretting it instantly — her voice had shrilled into a tone from a playground spat.

  “Isn’t that what you came all this way to find out? Hee hee.”

  “Maybe we should just move along to it now that we’ve gotten the mutual disdain for each other’s compromises out of the way.”

  He rose from the ground and brushed the dust from the seat of his pants, ancient khakis that might once have been worn deep in the Amazon or in the shadow of the Sphinx. His tank top was faded into the same indeterminate shade and hung from shoulders whose collarbones were clearly defined. He was bamboo-thin and burned by more suns than she’d cared to see, his hide cured but not quite leathery. It seemed to have constricted over every muscle, every tendon.

  Austin’s face had been like an artist’s once, brimming with sensitivity and curiosity. The bones of cheek and jaw were still there, unfatted, but his face now wore its stripes of crease and crinkle. The years hadn’t all been good ones. His hair remained on the darker side of auburn but hung now past his shoulders, with a single streak of silver flowing from just over his right ear. From the same spot on the left, a fat braid, half grown out and starting to mat together.

  She wanted to be furious with him. Didn’t he think part of her had ever wanted to have been the mad one, the impractical one, the one who’d refused normal obligations to leave room for finding answers to questions that most people only asked in their dreams? Austin wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to drink nectar.

  But she couldn’t be fur
ious, not when she saw how his clothes hung from him when he stood. In his gauntness she sensed the awful solitude of those years since they’d parted. Gabrielle could see him waking up in places that weren’t home and never could be, no romance of adventure to it, only momentum. Maybe he’d made room in his life for the arcane forms of magick, but this had left none for its everyday counterparts. She would’ve bet her life on it: He’d had no one with whom to subdivide a Sunday newspaper. Or sniff the air after a cleansing spring shower. He’d had no one to leave him sweet notes to find on mornings he’d slept late.

  She stepped forward, and so did he. The hug was awkward and stiff. When her cheek brushed against his hard bare shoulder its skin was hot, like a tiny sun.

  “Don’t send me away from here feeling like the last eleven years of my life were a mistake,” she said. “You could probably do it if you wanted to, but if you did, that’s something I would never forgive you for. Don’t do that to me.”

  Austin drawing back, peering at her — nobody just got up one morning and decided he wanted his eyes to look like that. It had to be earned. Had to accrue. She didn’t want him to say anything to make it better. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t be trite. Nothing that wouldn’t be at least half a lie.

  For all the years had done to him, and all she imagined he’d done to himself, when he touched her it was easy to forget she was another man’s wife. Austin needed no magick for that.

  And when she heard an old, familiar sound in the distance she was grateful for the way out of the moment it provided.

  Smiling now. “Do you know how many years it’s been since I’ve heard a train whistle?”

  “No.” Turning it back on her then: “Do you?”

  She brushed his cheek with the back of her fingers, knowing they must be thinking different versions of the same thing: that this had all begun with a train.

  “Besides the almost-nonexistent rent, that was part of the appeal of this place: I could hear that whistle every day,” he said. “The railroad runs past about a mile away. What we’re hearing now, it’s coming through Miracle. There’s an intersection at one end of the town.”