Falling Idols

You’d think the rest of it would’ve been easy.

I. Terra Firma

At the most unexpected moments she would think she’d seen him. He came when he had no business at all in her head, Gabrielle on one side of her life and Austin so far on the other it was a wonder she could even remember what he looked like.

But this was something more insidious than fond recollection. These were not memories, spawned by similarities in the faces of strangers, over which she would write his own. His face could not have remained the same, not the way he was living. Where Austin had been headed, these last eleven years would’ve cut and carved and eroded him, remade his once-sublime form into a degenerate parody of itself. No, these were nothing at all like memories — Gabrielle was, however briefly, seeing him as he must look now.

To a point, there was a logical explanation: New York was a dynamic and sinister place; he would be at home here. Austin McCoy would seek its pulse and wade through its chaos. If she thought she’d glimpsed him on Fifth Avenue it was only because he would have business there. If she saw him standing on a platform during a trip out to Long Island it was because trains had always appealed to him. Likewise subways — so why shouldn’t she see him beneath the streets, when the flashing of lights far along those grimy tunnels could strobe his half-shadowed impression anywhere on the other side of the window.

But why now, after eleven years? Whatever the reason, time-delayed pangs played no part in it.

I don’t miss him, Gabrielle told herself. I don’t miss him and I quit worrying about him years ago.

And when he called, how could she ever have told herself that she wasn’t, deep within, expecting it?

The talk was small at first and Austin did most of it, asking how she’d been, telling her that her name looked good up front in the magazine’s masthead.

“What are the offices like, the staff?” he asked. Remarking on the loose layouts, the splashy graphics. “Doesn’t seem like it’d be a very stodgy place to spend the day. Like Apple versus IBM, and you’re all fruit-pickers, right?”

She told him it wasn’t button-down, if that’s what he was driving at, then she heard him laugh.

“Corporate but ashamed, gotcha,” he said.

Gabrielle clenched the phone and lowered her voice to an edgy whisper. “If you had to call, then why didn’t you call me there? Why at home? Why call at all, Austin? Do you want to cause me trouble?”

How nearby was Philippe, anyway? Twenty feet? Twenty-five? The stereo on but not loud. He’d’ve heard the phone, but if she was lucky, nothing she was saying. She could lie afterward.

“You always did have a pretty pedestrian idea of trouble, didn’t you?”

“I’m hanging up now.” Empty threat. They both knew it.

After eleven years Austin’s voice was a dire peculiarity, something familiar made foreign by time. But she got past this quickly enough, that voice and its rasp remembering how to find its way inside her, slipping defenses and caressing memories she didn’t realize had been left so exposed. Austin had a magic and knew it, and eleven years doubled around on itself, the snake gulping down its tail. She had gone nowhere.

“I know you’ve been thinking about me lately,” he said. The rasp had roughened over the years. Like honeyed gravel now. “That’s my fault. It didn’t seem right to ring you up without getting you ready first. I hope I didn’t startle you.”

“You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear.”

“I’m in Utah. Why not book a flight? Technically it’d be work-related, I really think you’re going to want to see this.”

“Oh god, Austin,” she whispered. “What have you done now? Or what do you think you’ve done?”

“Should I send you a picture? Maybe you should close your eyes for this one.”

“Don’t,” she told him. “Just don’t.”

“All right. But it’s not so much what I’ve done as what I’ve found. A hint — would you like that much?”

Two worlds: Philippe in the next room with his day planner for tomorrow and his watered-down excuse for jazz music; Austin in her hand, on the far side of then and now and always. She could hear laughter in the background and knew it had nothing to do with him. From her hesitant silence he divined the go-ahead.

“Think back to when we were kids,” he said. “It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns. Its voice isn’t anything special, either. But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.”

*

Let me tell you about hope, middle child in a family of bastard triplets, trapped between faith and charity.

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?”