Falling Idols

by Brian Hodge

  The settlement drew others and, like most towns sprinkled throughout the expanding annex of the nation, went through times of boom and bust. Within a decade after the bones of that heroic mule had been gnawed clean out of nutritional desperation, rich deposits of copper were discovered nearby, then mined for nearly two generations until the shafts wheezed nothing but rocks and dust. By then there was too much town to dry up and blow away, but not enough to roll ahead on its own momentum. There was just enough to stagger in circles without falling.

  Why, then, after more than a century since its humble and sacrificial beginnings did it suddenly appear graced by a divine presence? Theories abounded, but one of the simplest held that the name itself had done it, that Heaven had looked down and read the sign on the way in, and decided that alone merited its attention, like a declaration of faith that had never been abandoned.

  Mule shit, said the crustier and more pragmatic of the old timers. It was enough to make the town’s namesake turn over in its shallow grave … if the beast even had one.

  Still, there was no denying the obvious: Something had come to Miracle. It was first seen floating just above the roofline in front of the town’s tallest building, the three-floor brick hotel. It was seen, on occasion, to emit such a dazzling light that the naked eye had to turn away. On a day of murderous heat, when the electricity went out, a dark and swollen cloud came in from across the distant mountains, in direct opposition to that day’s winds, and cooled the air and streets with a torrent of rain.

  Its interaction in the lives of individuals soon followed: a broken leg healed after a drunken tumble down a flight of stairs, a cancer burned painlessly from the jaw of a tobacco chewer. A woman who’d hours before learned that her son had been killed in an accident during army basic training claimed that it appeared in her home and held her through the night while she cried. His eyes, she said, were the most striking eyes she’d ever seen — one blue, the other brown.

  By the time Austin read this — incredulously reported in a month-old issue of Disclose magazine that had reached him in Alaska — the world was already beating a path to Miracle’s door.

  *

  Like most days when he’d made this walk, Austin covered the distance more quickly than he knew was humanly possible. Not far from the shack his head would begin to spin — not with the dizzy side-to-side vortex of drunkenness or illness, but one that seemed to wheel from back to front. He never felt as if he were losing his balance, just his sense of solid ground beneath him. It was not unpleasant, and he’d walk a bit farther along the desert road and find himself in Miracle as fast as if he’d driven.

  On foot yet four miles in as many minutes? It was profoundly disorienting at first. But now he just accepted, and laughed. And today headed for the hotel.

  With a hesitancy to discuss her past even greater than his own, Scarlett had come to Miracle last year within a week after he had. She’d given different last names on different occasions, and there was no reason to believe any were valid, just as there was no reason to believe that Scarlett was her given Christian name. He’d made these near-anonymous acquaintances before, men and women brushed into peculiar corners by circumstances of lives that had slipped their control, or those who’d remade themselves from scratch and hid from whatever they wanted to leave behind.

  It was morning, with Memuneh and Gabrielle off on their own, as he’d promised her. Austin supposed he was taking advantage of it to come say goodbye. Neither he nor Scarlett had ever said how long they planned on staying, but it went unspoken that Miracle was no permanent destination.

  “Well look at you, all red-faced and serious-looking,” she said when she opened the door to her room. “You run all this way just to see me, or are you meeting your friend for cornflakes and thought you’d drop by for a quick bounce?”

  “You know about Gabrielle already?”

  “This town doesn’t bustle so much these days that a new face doesn’t stand out when it stays more than one afternoon. People talk. She’s at the bed-and-breakfast, right? They know where she’s from, Austin, and I’ve got me a good memory. Oh, and come to think of it? I might’ve heard she wasn’t there for breakfast this morning, imagine that. Now where ever can she be, I wonder?”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s what I get for trying to keep a secret in a townful of born-again telepaths.”

  She reached out and drew him in by the buttons of his sun-faded denim shirt and began to undo them. “I’ve always found that to be one of your more endearing qualities, that you’ll laugh at your own kind.”

  But they weren’t his kind any more than they were hers, and everyone around knew it. He and Scarlett may have come to Miracle in last year’s flood of seekers, but there the similarities ended. They were both outcasts in that sense, suspect and heretical.

  As a mecca, Miracle was just as crippled now as it had been as a played-out mining town, and this had nothing to do with Memuneh’s abrupt vanishing from public view. The town drew children in adult bodies, and while he didn’t fault them for the sillier beliefs and practices they clung to — children were like that — they showed up wanting to bathe in the glow of angels without ever having shaken hands with devils. Desperate for lives that meant something more than sweat and a grave, they craved the light without wanting to know about the darkness. The wiser among them would eventually learn that the two were indivisible. One couldn’t be had without the other. The rest would always live in fear.

  Scarlett seemed the only other one who knew this. She shunned the tarot readers, the crystal merchants, the aroma therapists. She laughed at the wishful thinkers who looked to the desert and swore the buttes were shaped like pyramids. She mocked the fools who waited for a spacecraft to land and pick them up.

  Then why was she here?

  “You ever hear about the man, thought he was losing his mind, so he checked into the asylum to compare?” she’d told him, her only nod toward an explanation.

  “I thought he never left,” Austin had said.

  “That was only because he didn’t have anyone else to talk to on his own level.”

  And yet. He’d had more serious discussions with the cook at the diner than with Scarlett. It was as if she’d gravitated toward him precisely because she sensed that he wouldn’t go prattling on about auras.

  As she pulled him toward the bed he thought of Gabrielle on her hike this morning with Memuneh, and it felt like a betrayal. Not just of Gabrielle and the resurrection of old feelings, but of Scarlett too. He’d never even told her about finding the Kyyth, much less introduced them. She’d seemed so complete without it, the time to do so never right.

  She was one of those rare women who became less vulnerable the less she wore, as comfortable in her skin as a panther. There was something about her that he found, not godless, but resolutely pagan. In her physicality she was unapologetic and unshameable. In their coupling Austin felt he came closer to death than he ever had with trains or accidental overdoses.

  While she liked to be mounted from behind, bracing herself on hands and knees, there was nothing submissive about it, as she rammed fiercely back with haunches strong as a mare’s. The rising and falling arch of her spine was muscled and, like the rest of her, brown as a pecan. If she scissored him between her thighs he was as good as clenched by a python. Scarlett would toss her head, that shimmering fall of straight hair, crow-black with a reddish sheen, and look back at him over her shoulder as he held on, and her grin was the most lascivious thing he’d ever seen, as if she knew exactly the effect she was having on him.

  But that was hardly likely.

  This one stubborn concession to an animal urge became the gateway to the most universal trait shared by everything alive: It was like dying. They made savage love and he died, over and over and over and over.

  His loins took care of themselves, lunging after rapture, but synapses fired in his head without regard for logic. Like frames from movies seen only while passing through a room, or the fr
ustrating sips of otherwise forgotten dreams.

  They took him over again, as soon as he’d gotten to the state where he couldn’t have dwelled upon Gabrielle and Memuneh if he’d tried. Eros and thanatos saturated every breath. He floundered in a chilly bog while a bronze blade slashed his throat. A steel axe caught the sun before splitting his helmet on a battlefield of baked clay. He was shot in an alley, he sighed final breaths upon soft beds and wheezed in agony with fluid-choked lungs and felt the spark leave him as he stared at cow dung inches from his eyes. He felt the claws of a leopard crack open the bony little cage of his chest.

  There was no end of ways to die, and when he meshed with Scarlett he was privy to them all.

  Had they been his own demises? Other lives, other times? He didn’t know. The forty years of this one seemed enough, that he’d lived different lifetimes in just a few years, through cycles of madness and despair and hope and hatred and love and joy, each one consuming him yet always leaving a capacious hunger for more.

  As always, he knew death, and together he and Scarlett found their release, then he slumped across the moist sheen of her back and felt the reaffirming thud of his heart. She shrugged him off her and they rolled over on sweaty sheets. She drew her legs up, crossed them at the knee and dangled five toes over his belly.

  “This was it, wasn’t it, Austin?” she said. “I can feel it. This had ‘finale’ written all over it.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “Were you planning on telling me? Or just assuming I’d figure it out on my own?”

  He had to chuckle. “I didn’t know you ever waited to be told anything.”

  “Well now you have a point.” The toes came down, lightly squashing his wet genitals. “You’re going away with her?”

  “It’s why she’s here. Neither of us knew it at first, but it’s why she came.”

  “Sure about that, are you? What’s so special about her? A nomad like you, you must’ve had lots of basis for comparison.”

  “Gabrielle … believed in me. At a time when no one else did. She believed.”

  “I guess that’d explain why she left you all those years ago. Yeah. Anyway. What’s it matter who believed you and who didn’t, as long as you knew what was true about you?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you just need that mirror for your own sanity. You know — like the man who went to the asylum?”

  Scarlett looked out the window. “I hate it when they use my own damn words on me.”

  “There aren’t going to be any grudges here, are there?”

  She turned onto her side and her elbow. “I’m not possessive, Austin. I’m very disappointed in you. In what you’re settling for now. But I’m not possessive.”

  “And fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow’s another day, right?”

  “Wait and see,” she said. “It might even be more than that.”

  III. Terra Infernal

  Their hike had started not long after sunrise, leisurely and even meandering at times, but always guided by a sense of destination. Memuneh would stop and show her a particular bush or rock formation as if it had some special significance to him, but wouldn’t always explain why, and when he did, the explanations as often as not left her baffled.

  “Don’t move any closer to that rock. A nest of diamondback rattlesnakes lives beneath it,” he told her. “I spent a day here once letting them bite me.”

  She’d come to Utah with proper clothes for this — loose shorts and a white cotton blouse and a hat wide enough to shade her face — but had had to use her MasterCard to buy hiking shoes. A worthy investment. With them on her feet and Austin’s canteens slung on her hip, she’d lost her terror of the desert now that it would have to work so much harder to kill her. Drink her water, watch her step, and all was well. As for the heat, summers in New York could be as bad, with humidity, concrete, and kamikaze taxis to tip the balance. She could even claim witness to the imperious beauty that Austin found here.

  A friend she’d lost track of had once spent a year in Africa and come back singing the praises of ripping herself loose of all that was familiar. New languages, new cultures, new faces — almost everything she knew had been invalidated. It had been, her friend said, the most terrifying and exhilarating time of her life.

  Gabrielle now thought she could understand what this must’ve been like, the past few days taking her to a place that a shift in geography alone could never have accomplished. It had been the rediscovery of a world she’d seen long ago but rejected, in her youth too intimidated by its strangeness to acknowledge it, too threatened by its darker corners to let them touch her.

  It was no place to live every day — even Austin seemed to know that now — but it could shape the ways those days were spent.

  And now, as she moved in the shadows of vast rocks, she felt a manic joy, no longer afraid to walk away from the life she thought she’d wanted.

  Memuneh pointed to a hummock of red stone curving out of the earth. “Here. Look. Here. This is where I encountered Austin. I was sitting, he was walking.”

  “He told me you were crying.”

  Memuneh didn’t affirm it, but neither did he deny.

  “Why?”

  “Because I was able,” he said, and seemed to edge away from the matter. She decided not to press it. Had done so once already and the resulting seizure was nothing she wanted to repeat.

  “Why’d you talk to Austin at all?” she asked instead. “If what he says is true, you hadn’t shown yourself in Miracle for a couple of months or more. To anyone. Why him, then?”

  “I had watched him already, from a distance. I knew who and what he was. I watched him play with the whirlwinds. When he saw me that day he looked at me with such recognition that I saw from his eyes that he already knew the Kyyth, even if our name was unknown to him. He saw me, and knew, and his knees didn’t bend. I had no reason to hide, because there was nothing in him like the others.”

  “You were hiding from the whole town?”

  “They were not what I thought they were,” he said, “and when the new ones came they were not what I hoped they would be.”

  He seemed bewildered by this, like a child in a new school struggling to make sense of why he wasn’t accepted for himself. And Memuneh was a child, in some odd, handicapped fashion. “Touched in the head,” Austin had described him, and it was cruelly apt.

  At first this was hardly reassuring, that even the agents of whatever lay beyond the narrow spectrum of everyday didn’t have all the answers. But now she was reconsidering. In a peculiar way, Memuneh offered hope, if not in the manner he probably intended. Because if there was room for mistakes — and in his failure and simplicity he seemed to be just that — then there was always room for atonement, and death would not be the harsh judge she’d grown up being told it was.

  He led her onward, and they stopped awhile to watch a hawk on the wing, a dark scythe against the blue, riding air currents in slow, lazy spirals. The sun was high overhead when they reached a gulley between a pair of facing cliffs, and she followed him into it. A half-mile later he pointed out a spot along the wall where some ancient river had carved out a slice from the base to leave a smooth hollow, fifteen feet high and sheltered from wind, sun, and rain by a sloping overhang.

  Yes. Oh yes. Here was where Memuneh came when Austin didn’t see him for days.

  It was an art gallery, petroglyphs faded by the ages but indelibly left upon the rock in red and white and black and brown ochres. The oldest, he told her, predated the birth of Christ by six thousand years. Some were contemporaneous with that; others a mere eight centuries years old.

  How haunting they were: animal totems and the undulating lines of giant snakes, spirals and spoked circles and stars, hand prints and faces with gaping fanged mouths, skinny hunters with their spears. But most mysterious were the bulkier figures more than human, with huge staring eyes, or great racks of antlers or curving horns, or simply rendered dark and solid in their broad-shouldered inscrut
ability.

  They demanded silence and slow breaths, and she was glad to offer it to them.

  “The people in Miracle are no longer even aware this is here,” Memuneh said. “Austin knows, but would never tell them.”

  She nodded. It was just as well.

  “I only wanted to bring them light,” he said, “and hold those who needed it when it was dark for them. I believed that I brought enough light for all of them, but there were so many who wanted to possess it. Light. How can light be possessed?”

  He told her then that he’d watched them kill over it. Not publicly, but in secret, at night. He admitted that there had to have been more behind it than what he witnessed, but four of those who already lived here had driven three new arrivals into the desert, far past the other side of town. Graves had already been dug, and to keep the murders from being given away by the sound of distant gunfire, they were committed with a shovel and a pick-axe. “‘It’s our angel,’” Memuneh told her one of them had said, “‘not yours.’” He’d not shown himself in Miracle since that night.

  She felt sickened. “You … you couldn’t stop it?”

  “Stop it?”

  “Just the sight of you would’ve done it — don’t you think? God!”

  Memuneh stared, tender face suddenly alien to her, seemingly amazed that she could even suggest such a thing.

  “It was only their bodies dying. They did not. Bodies always die. Why would I stop something so natural? I comfort suffering and remove it if I can, but death? There is no stopping that. Death is its own law.”

  Then why, she demanded, had he let the murders drive him into seclusion? Why abandon the rest and douse that precious light he’d been so eager to bring? Why sit on his ass in the desert and wait for Austin to come along and finding him crying over it?