Falling Idols

“Don’t try remembering the moment if you don’t want to. It’s a thing no boy should dwell on if he can help it. Think about this instead: Can you cut air? Can you cut water?”

Austin shook his head no.

“You may feel solid. But you’re not as solid as you think.” The man grinned, firelight glinting off his teeth. “It’s a world of illusion you live in. You may not have always known it but your soul did. Remembered how to spread the word just in time, too, by the looks of it.”

The lessons of hundreds of Sundays began to seep through at last. This man may have looked like a stew bum but that was just a disguise.

“Are you an angel?” Austin whispered.

The man turned one way, then another, looking over either shoulder. He shrugged at Austin. “Do you see any wings?”

“I don’t see no trumpets neither, but that don’t mean you haven’t got one somewhere.”

“Well observed. Then I expect maybe I am.”

“But—” Now he was having some problems. “My momma says angels only sing and make big announcements and test people and save them if they want to, but they don’t come sit around and jaw. Not like this.”

The man laughed and slapped both hands down on his knees. “Nothing against your dear mother but she sounds like a stupid woman to me, one who lets books and other people do her thinking for her instead of making up her own mind about what’s right in front of her. But if that’s her way, then you can’t take it from her, no more than she can set yours for you. You have to realize she’s not nearly as old inside as you are, and that can make a difference. So you’ll just have to be patient with her.”

Austin tried telling the man that he was wrong, that she was almost thirty, kids weren’t older than their mothers, but the man just grinned again as though he had a secret and ate more beans.

“Sir?” Austin said. “Will you answer me a question? Does this mean I can’t ever be hurt or nothing?”

“You can hurt yourself. You can always hurt yourself. I were you, I’d not go jumping in front of any more locomotives just to see what I could get away with. And in a few years when you start shaving, don’t get the idea you need never worry about nicking your chin. It’s all a matter of degree.”

He recalled feeling like Superman at the time, or maybe Superman dreaming of being a boy again.

“I never heard of nobody else being this way. Why me?”

“Well now, there’d be two answers to that. The short one and the long one, but young as your mind is, neither one would do you much good today.” The man shook his shaggy head. “Besides, it’s a thing you should really be figuring out for yourself.”

The man, if a man he was, treated himself to another helping of beans, then sighed and gazed toward the faint greenish glow at the opposite end of the tunnel. Telling Austin that he had to go back outside now, there would be people looking for him and that the kindest thing he could do for them all was turn up alive. For Gabrielle especially, inconsolable Gabrielle who was sure she’d watched him die.

Austin trudged through mist and chill, and the nearer he got to the entrance, the brighter grew daylight’s sheen upon the moist and dripping walls. He looked back only once, and saw a fading glow of embers.

At the entrance he blinked away the glare in his eyes. The world had never looked so clear, so green. But he and Gabrielle said so every time they came out. He walked farther, until he could hear voices calling to each other over on the tracks, and none of them sounded as though they were having a very good day.

It was nothing he would have noticed back in the dark of the tunnel, with other things vying for attention, but out in the daylight he spotted it the first time he looked down: Slashed across the front of his jeans, along the top of both thighs, was a fat stripe of oiled grime, as though he’d draped his empty pantlegs over the rail and waited for the train wheels to grind it in.

Whipping for sure. His mother would never get a stain like that out in the wash.

*

“They’re called the Kyyth,” he told Gabrielle. “If there was ever a language it meant something in, it’s dead and long gone by now. He hasn’t said much about that. He gets evasive about certain things.”

“So what you’ve got back there floating in that room is the same as whatever you said talked to you in the tunnel.”

“Same species, different individual. The big difference is, the one thirty years ago had his shit together, I think. This one, he’s a bit … touched in the head, is how our families might’ve put it.”

“All these years I’d decided that never happened, that you’d dreamed it or had a concussion from the fall,” she said. “So what you have back there sleeping on your ceiling—”

“He has a name, why don’t we use that. Memuneh. Or it’s what he likes to be called now. I get the impression they don’t keep the same names indefinitely.”

“Memuneh, then. Memuneh was responsible for the things that happened in the town last year.”

“Sad, but true.”

“Why sad?”

Austin almost told her but reconsidered. “Maybe you should make up your own mind about that after you talk to him. You might see it differently. You might not think it’s sad after all.”

“You called him a lying prick.”

Austin grinned. “I did, didn’t I? Don’t let it bias you, it wasn’t without affection.”

She was up and off the porch in another moment, going nowhere but in circles, compelled to move all the same. He knew the urge. You couldn’t take these things in and just sit on your ass. You felt you had to do something with the knowledge, right that very moment, and there was nothing to be done but let it settle in and begin reweaving the fabric of the world you thought you knew. Some days he believed that being given hints of a