Falling Idols

“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 deja 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.