by Brian Hodge
And then there was Memuneh, with idiosyncrasies all his own. As doe-eyed as if he’d stepped fresh from a Renaissance canvas, with flaxen hair center-parted and shoulder-length, swept to either side of a high, pale forehead. He could weep, Austin knew, but apparently hadn’t wanted his flesh to sweat.
When Austin touched Gabrielle’s wrist, she stopped talking and followed his gaze. Saw the face, expressionless in the window, then he heard her breath catch in her throat.
Memuneh faded from the window. After it became apparent that he wasn’t going to step outside, they followed. He’d retreated all the way across the room, by the iron stove.
“It’s only Gabrielle,” Austin said. “I told you about her.”
They watched each other in mutual apprehension, as if each was afraid to be the first to move.
“I find your name very beautiful,” Memuneh said to her. She actually blushed. “You watched me dreaming. In the other room.”
Gabrielle, looking at the floor now, stammering an apology.
“You fly in your dreams too,” Memuneh went on. “When you do, you never feel that it’s a new talent you’ve only just learned, but a very old ability—”
“That I’ve just remembered,” she whispered, and touched her lips with fingertips.
“Exactly. That’s the genuine you. Why have you brought her here, Austin?”
“Good question,” he said.
There was no doubt that Gabrielle believed him now, the one person in the world whose opinion of him over time truly mattered. He was vindicated. But was this all? Two thousands miles for him to say, “I told you so”? It couldn’t be as petty as that, his pride alone, of no benefit to her.
She was recovering her wits easily enough — Austin could see whatever remained of the journalist inside rising to this rare opportunity — but then Memuneh himself hardly discouraged it. What degree of power a Kyyth might wield Austin didn’t know. Memuneh, though, had elected to look as if one punch would floor him.
Despite what he was, and the unearthly androgynous beauty of his form, Memuneh looked entirely unintimidating. Gabrielle was advancing on him and it appeared to make him uncomfortable. She, a convert all over again, old doubts slipping from her like the scales from Saul’s eyes: I shut my heart to what I knew was true, all these years, oh my god the loss of them, tell me, tell me as much as my ears can bear, tell me what’s true and what’s a lie, tell me why there’s so much pain, tell me the thoughts of God. Tell me.
But Memuneh was backing away from her, sliding first along the wall, and then up it, head tucking into his shoulder as his feet left the floor. His arms circled his front, cradling himself as he rose, hair brushing against the ceiling and his legs drawing up, and he stopped. Eyes losing focus, each tracking independently now, like a chameleon’s, whites showing in the center as the mismatched irises rolled to the outside.
He had almost none of the quiet self-surety of the Kyyth from the train tunnel. Memuneh was at times like an autistic child. An angel savant.
His eyes were fibrillating in his head, then his head itself began to tremble. A thread of fragrant fluid, like filtered honey, slipped from the corner of his mouth and to the floor. From deeper in his throat, two notes, one high, the other low, their pitches in wavering flux like the unsure harmonies of wolf pups learning to howl. The sound of it prickled hair and Gabrielle was beside herself for having triggered this.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Austin told her.
From behind them, another sound, the soft rustling of growth. They turned to see green tendrils curling from the symbols he’d marked on the walls, not that he needed them anymore but he felt a nostalgia for the crude gateways they’d once been. From their flaking rust-toned lines surged this unexpected new life. Buds fattened at their ends, then bloomed, a garden of morning glories yawning open, then they too began to sing, in shrill screeching voices that pierced like needles of sound.
Gabrielle had pressed her hands over her ears and Austin was about to follow her lead when the flowers quieted. Memuneh fell silent a moment later, drifting back to the floor and focusing his eyes. He looked at the blooms, already beginning to wilt, wither, fall.
“If you insist on painting your walls,” he said, “there are better mediums than blood. I do not like that.”
“My walls, my blood,” Austin said. “Or most of it.”
Memuneh crushed shut his eyes, as if his heart were breaking. “Oh, Austin. How will you ever reach for the future as long as you keep clinging to the past?”
He said he couldn’t be here right now, that he wished to go off somewhere and wait for the stars. A few moments after he was gone, Austin decided anything would be better than facing the look in Gabrielle’s eyes, so he found a rag, and began to clean up the spatters of honeydew and dead blossoms.
*
He’d lost track of her life long before he dropped out of college, but the year after, she was home for a visit and he was home to bury his father, so she came to see it done. Was there any such innocent beast as coincidence? Or was there a process at work here, hidden and cunning? He didn’t think about this until later, caring now only that he could cherish the woman she’d become, and that his skin was clear again.
But it was more than outgrowing the spotty adolescent he’d been. Austin supposed he’d changed enough to seem a new creature entirely, reborn from their shared chrysalis of summer scabs and wonder. New thoughts, new feelings — maybe he was exotic to her now. As children they’d hunted angels, and he still believed, but now he disdained them.
If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well, Rilke had written. A revelation. Court the devils with enough enthusiasm and maybe it would shock the angels from their complacent limbo. Angels were like cats, coming whenever they pleased, and devils like dogs — they eagerly came when called.
Anyone’s twenties are a time of great indestructibility, and the days are fertile, without limit. Austin and Gabrielle moved around a lot because there were so many places to move to. Odd jobs when they needed money, slack time when they didn’t. The occasional marijuana transport could keep them flush for months.
Three times, in three different cities, his heart stopped as he overdosed on one drug or another, and after he was resuscitated he would try to remember if he’d seen the tunnel of light that everyone always mentioned. Or his old pal from that other tunnel, the train tunnel, shaking his head with a disapproving sigh and saying, “What did I tell you? Don’t be pushing your luck.”
But no. He got none of this, only a nagging sense of dèjá vu, I’ve done this before, died many many times before, how could I have forgotten all those others…? And then he would wake to the world and Gabrielle’s reddened eyes, and promise her never again.
He couldn’t imagine another woman willing to look inside him for whatever it was that kept her with him. Gabrielle seemed the one pure thing in a wretched world, but maybe that was because she didn’t see the world the same way. If it was true that souls had ages, then hers was one of the young ones; it frisked about like a kitten, driven by curiosity and delight. But his was a weary old tom, waiting out the days in its place in the sun while nursing a disgruntled hunch that something better had passed it by.
People couldn’t live this way forever.
For the past eleven years he’d tried to see it through her eyes instead of his own. Twilight in the Badlands of South Dakota — he’d wanted to go there ever since reading Steinbeck’s impression of that harsh and arid place, knowing by now how artists could be prophets without realizing it, truths they’d never consciously intended seeping into their brush strokes or their words.
They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child, Steinbeck had written of the Badlands. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding. A sense comes from it that it does not like or welcome humans.
But the Badlands didn�
��t drive Austin away, and that was welcome enough. He and Gabrielle rented a cabin on their border and did what they always did whenever they put civilization behind them: divided their attentions between earth and sky.
He’d been gone a full day when she came looking for him on one of the trails they’d explored together. In the years to follow Austin imagined what it must’ve been like for her, picking her way along the runnels of erosion.
She spotted him on the wide, flat top of a rocky outcropping, kneeling and stripped to the waist. He imagined how he must’ve looked to her as she drew nearer and saw first the braided rawhide whip doubled together in his fist, then the mass of bleeding welts draped over each bare shoulder, all the way down his back to his waist.
He imagined her revulsion on seeing the coyote, the condition of its tawny pelt. Surely she understood that it was dead.
A storm had threatened earlier. The evening sky was a dense blue-gray, sawn at by jagged ridges of stone. The wind blew from the northwest and sliced itself apart to get to them.
“They’re coming,” he told her. “You can’t believe how hard they’re trying to get through here.”
And if she understood that the coyote was dead already, he could imagine her grasping for some rational explanation why it would still be moving, but just its throat and lower jaw, like the victim of a stroke trying to form sensible words. All through that night, he never could make out what they were.
But he could imagine how Gabrielle must’ve felt, turning her back on the sight and running for the cabin. He found it empty the next morning, and the van was gone. She’d left a note, at least.
That he didn’t blame her, he regarded as a sign of growth.
Did you ever consider, she’d written in the note, that you’ve taken what was a beautiful, inexplicable experience you had as a boy and used it to destroy your life?
Only every day, he told the note.
Only every day.
*
She went back to town after Memuneh’s seizure — he didn’t know what else to call it — and did not return all that next day. Or the day after that. The Kyyth was gone as well, but his disappearances were common enough, and never lengthy.
Her headlights woke him late the next night but he pretended they hadn’t as she eased open the shack door and crossed to where he lay on the mattress on the floor. On his side, Austin feigned sleep the way most people never thought to, breathing slowly and deeply instead of falling deathly silent. She bought it. He could feel her go to her knees on the mattress, then slowly draw the sheet down to his waist and leave it there. She was looking at his back in the moonlight, at its mat of old scars. He thought she might’ve touched one, very lightly, but the feeling there was nearly gone.
Soon she retreated but never left, and maybe he’d slept for a moment, because when he began to wonder if she was still watching him in the dark, and turned over to peek through slitted eyes, he saw that Memuneh had come back without his even realizing it.
Near the door, Gabrielle was sitting with both legs tucked beneath her, sagging back against Memuneh. He held her from behind as a parent might hold a child stricken with sorrows, arms wrapped protectively around her, rocking her so gently she might’ve been made of crystal. Now and again his arm would rise, and his fingers dab beneath her eyes.
They were both at such peace Austin dared not move. For all the mystery of his origins, Memuneh seemed a simple creature. He aspired only to be a comforter, as if unsure of what he was, and in lieu of that certainty had looked to paintings for the gentlest reflections of how his kind was seen by those who professed to need them most. He was the creation of dead men and pigments.
Gabrielle was still there in the morning when Austin awoke for good, but not the Kyyth — granting them privacy, maybe. He saw that she was looking through his journals. That he didn’t mind and that she didn’t look sheepish when he spotted her … there could be no greater evidence than this to their having reached back toward their old familiarity.
“‘Let me tell you about loss,’” she read aloud. “‘Let me tell you about lies. Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.’” She closed the notebook. “Feeling a little maudlin that day, were we?”
“Or that year,” he said.
“Did you write that about anybody I know?” She set the journal aside. “Had your heart torn out by women and angels. Just think of the songs you could write.”
He decided to say nothing of the previous night, simply see where the day led. After he slipped on his pants she followed him outside, and he used the tiny outhouse and washed from the bucket at the pump, then shaved. She combed out the snarls in his braid and rewove it, and ran her fingers through the streak of silver on the other side.
“What brought you out of it?” she asked. “Your maudlin era.”
“Evolution?” he guessed. “I just got sick of the sound of my own gloom. I was so full of shit. I really missed laughter. So I started by laughing at myself. You can’t imagine how liberating that was.”
“I’d like to try,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard.
She levered water from the pump and let it cascade over her bare feet. She was wearing a dress, full and flimsy and very free about her hips and ankles, and as the day advanced the heat didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as it had before.
She was still there at dusk, so they watched the evening redness in the west while eating the eggs and beans he cooked over an open fire. The night was clean and cool and cloudless, perfect for stargazing. They spread two layers of blankets on the shack’s roof — ground level was risky; sidewinders might be drawn to their body heat. They lay on their backs, side by side, above them the light and dust of the galaxy, one of billions. For an hour she said nothing, and he wondered how long it had been since she’d seen this panorama, the man-made luster of New York stealing it from her sky.
“Do you remember when we used to do this before, and what we used to say the stars were?” she said. “Sure you do, you remember everything.”
“I remember,” he said. “Your idea, though, wasn’t it?”
“We were probably stoned.”
A decade and a half or more ago they’d decided that stars were the souls of the dead, still shining, and the souls of the yet-to-be, waiting for their descent. Or maybe one and the same, souls in respite before their return, that next chance to get it right, or at least better than the lifetime before. It was utter bongwater, but explained Hell, trapped in a nuclear ball of gas and fusion that burned away all the taints unfit to live behind a baby’s smile.
She told him that Memuneh had promised to share with her the same things he’d already shared with Austin. She asked if there was anyplace in particular that Memuneh went when he wasn’t staying at the shack. Austin just grinned and said, well, maybe he’d share that with her too, while he was being so forthcoming.
“He has a thing for the desert,” Austin said. “He says it reminds him of what’s left of the home of the first civilization, when they first met us.”
“Which — Egypt? Sumer?”
“Earlier than either one, according to him. A lot earlier.”
Later they listened to a train as it roared through and out of Miracle, whistle piercing the night, then saw the distant spear of its headlamp as it raced across the darkened land. And since he’d never lived where wolves were known to roam, this was how he imagined their howls to sound in the wild, purposeful and forlorn and sharp with wanderlust.
Maybe Gabrielle felt it too, because soon she asked what was next for him. Where would he go from here, once he’d gleaned all he could from this rare and wondrous encounter? Would it always be shacks and subsistence, for the rest of his life? Was there no part of him left that wouldn’t be let down by what an average day had to offer? Or did something yet remain that would be satisfied by what he could hold in his hands and heart?
Valid questions, all.
“You said you have a woman here?
” she said, voice flat now.
“Yes.” Then, “She’s no one I could grow old with. It’s not that type of relationship.”
“What’s her name?”
“Scarlett.” He waited for snide comments, but they never came.
“You’re already old, Austin. We’ve always known that.”
She said nothing more about Scarlett, and throughout the day, as during her arrival, had said nothing at all about her husband back in New York. He found this more revealing than any truth she might’ve shared or lie she might’ve attempted.
And now it was clear as the night sky why she’d come. It was not to be taught, nor to forgive, although that was part of it. It was, instead, to usher him back to the rest of his life, far from these fields of ephemera. I’ve seen the nearest shore of Heaven, so burn out my eyes, because it could never be Paradise without her … and even with eternity in the balance I still don’t know if I can bear her absence one more day.
In eleven years he could not remember a single sunrise when some part of him hadn’t ached for missing her.
When he reached for her hand she didn’t pull it away, and he found that if he focused on the stars he could forget about the blankets and roof beneath them, and it was almost like flying.
*
Despite claims by the town’s latter-day immigrants and all the revisionist New Age apocrypha written up in cheaply-printed booklets and sold from wire racks beside cash registers, the long-term residents knew better and laughed: Miracle, Utah, had never been named for some earlier imprimatur of divine favor. It had been called Miracle to honor a mule of the same name owned by the first family to settle the area in the early 1880s. The mule had pulled a wagonload of their earthly possessions across the Great Plains, over the Rockies, and into the parched Utah desert, where the family — all fourteen of them, minus the three lost along the way — opted to make their home within the paltry oasis of fertility they found there. Mostly dead anyway, the mule was shot through the head and eaten.
