It began with an old man, a man who had spent his life editing moving pictures in early Bollywood, before sound-and afterwards as well, but with less satisfaction. He could not stop thinking about the bitter taste of black walnuts on his tongue. As he worked there had always been a bowl at his elbow, and he cracked the walnuts in his left fist. This was what he missed most about being alive. His yearning was a magnetic storm, a riptide. We were infected with longing as if by a mighty plague. Then there were the others with their baked beans, their goat curries, their steel-cut oats with maple syrup, even the recollected taste of their own blood.
Bitter, sweet, salty, sour. Just when we thought we understood, that we could arrest the contagion, it was rumoured there was a fifth flavour.
There we were, in the grip of an intense curiosity about the senses that had been tamped down since time began. Sight and sound we could almost comprehend, but taste and smell, and, most unfathomable of all, touch- how was it these things could conjure ecstasy and revulsion in equal measure? (The Christ, who had suckled at the teat and could have spoken to the matter from experience, is such an ascetic that he remained silent when quizzed about the wine, unleavened bread, and olives, not to mention the fine ointments administered by women’s hands. The pain and suffering, on the other hand, these he never minded sharing.)
The five of us-Barman, Elyon, Rachmiel, Yabbashael, and Zachriel-were selected as emissaries. (Note to Gabriel:
Lacking corporeality, we have no distinguishing physical characteristics, but, unlike the sentinels and tutelary geniuses, we messengers do have traits that set us apart. In our small group Barman is the preternaturally intelligent one; Elyon, the efficient and vengeful one (best known for bringing the plague of hail upon Egypt); Rachmiel, the merciful one; Yabbashael, the cheerful one; and Zachriel, the understanding one (for comparable empathy, Barman says, one has to look to Commander Troi from the American television series
We have no gender, of course, but on Arcadia Court we became four teenaged boys and a girl. At the time that distinction meant nothing to us. With at least 3.8 million millennia of combined experience, the one thing we had never suspected we were was naive.
The morning we arrived, a number of things happened-or didn’t happen-inside the homes on the quiet cul-de- sac of Arcadia Court that the observant might have recognized as miracles.
Bashaar Khan had gone to bed the previous night with a new eruption of acne across his cheeks but woke with clear skin, a fact he celebrated by working an excessive amount of “product” into his dark hair until it resembled the varnished shell of a rhinoceros beetle. Stephan Choo’s mother did not have to carry her son’s bedding straight to the laundry room, holding it at arm’s length to maximize her distance from the sadly familiar acrid smell. Leo Costello Jr. did not begin the day by giving his little sister and brother the usual cheerful noogies, so that their wailing did not wake their parents and the family members ended up clambering into their lease-to-own Ford Escape later than usual. This gave them the opportunity to witness the hitherto mythic shopping-cart racers hurtling down Mountain Highway, daredevil homeless men who had, as Leo Sr. said, “obviously nothing left to lose.” They collected bottles and dwelt in the rough of Hastings Creek where the children of Arcadia Court were frequently warned not to go.
And, perhaps most significant, Jessica Wadsworth sat down and ate breakfast for the first time in three years. Her brother, Jason-whom we would shortly learn was almost exclusively referred to as The Wad-greeted his parents not with a grunt but with a beatific smile. This inspired his mother to head to his room to ransack it for illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia, while his father turned to Jason’s twin sister, urging Jessica to take another helping of yogurt and muesli.
“Do we have any walnuts, Father?” Jason asked. “Or baked beans, perchance?”
“Oh my God,” his mother yelled from the hallway. “It’s the
That Thursday was, as Barman, our specialist on world religions, later pointed out, the Catholics’ Feast of Scholastica, patron saint of convulsive children. “Isn’t that ironic?” But when asked in what way, Barman, being new to the concept, just shrugged.
We hope the records will show that what we did was undertaken not as a lark but in the true spirit of exploration. In other words, like Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, we were
That first morning the rain and the smell of damp cedar and the ozone-charged air overwhelmed our just- awakened senses. How can we explain it? It was as if magma flowed in our veins, rather than blood.
And everywhere the taste of the undiscovered was practically vibrating on our tongues.
Our first heady days went by in a blur of rampaging sensations so intense we thought we could understand how overwhelmed autistic children must feel, or someone newly awakened from a coma who finds himself on the streets of Pamplona during the festival of the bulls. But one particular day does stand out: February 14, St. Valentine’s Day, 2011.
It was only our third day of school, a Monday. We’d had a relatively quiet weekend after the initial tumult of familiarizing ourselves with the young people whose bodies we now inhabited. Rachmiel and Yabbashael were hosted by the fifteen-year-old twins Jessica and Jason Wadsworth. The former was a small, winter-melon-coloured thing with brittle hair, thinned flesh stretched over pointy bones, veins crosshatched under the surface of her skin. As if they were siblings in a nursery rhyme or biblical parable, her brother, in contrast, was a ruddy young ox, golden hair razed close to the scalp, a boy whose idea of a joke was to stick a tree-trunk leg out from under a cafeteria table, trip up a student carrying a loaded tray, and gaze around in feigned bewilderment.
Zachriel was now Bashaar Khan, who was handsome in a fourteen-year-old way and knew it. Athletic and talented in the arts, he was a boy destined to make his mark. Some older youths from the North Vancouver musallah had noticed Bashaar’s capabilities as well and had launched a stealth campaign to radicalize him. Fully enamoured of Western excess, Bashaar had so far rebuffed their advances.
Barman was inhabiting Leo Costello Jr., a shaggy-haired boy of fourteen who was as agile as he was quick- witted, and loved, or at least tolerated, by everyone, it seemed, save his younger brother and sister. We couldn’t help but notice that of all our hosts Barman’s was the most congenial. (“A match made in heaven,” Barman agreed.)
And Elyon had borrowed the body of Stephan Choo, the only progeny of an aging couple originally from Guangzhou who had given up on having children when unexpectedly blessed with Stephan. An intelligent, much- adored, and coddled boy, he had trouble navigating the shoals of childhood. Although only twelve, Stephan was completing his first year of high school, in the same grade eight class as Leo Jr., due to a well-intentioned school board initiative called “acceleration.”
Stephan’s only valentine cards that day were from the school librarian and the rest of us. “You got a valentine from The Wad and The Stick Insect?” asked one incredulous backbencher, a boy with a lazy eye and a hairstyle we came to know as a faux-hawk. He plucked from Stephan’s hand the cards he had received from the twins, rather modest declarations of friendship from cartoon characters named SpongeBob and Squidward. It was fortunate he didn’t notice the ones from Bashaar and Leo Jr., one featuring a prancing pony with the words, “I sure get a kick out of you! Be My Valentine!” inside the stylized shape of a heart, and the other a sock-puppet mermaid: “You’re my FISH come true!”
The heart, we were to learn, is a lonely muscle.
As soon as school let out that afternoon, Stephan was surrounded by a group of boys making off-colour suggestions about various activities he might get up to with the twins. They tied him to the neglected tetherball post in the far end of the sports field with a skipping rope and subjected him to a vigorous round of three-on-three. By the time Leo Jr. and Bashaar intervened, the boys had fled hooting and there was a puddle on the cracked asphalt around Stephan’s feet.
It seemed nothing in Herodotus, Sun Tzu, or even Revelation had adequately prepared us for teenaged mores and the indignities of Elysium Heights Secondary.
Adjusting to our bodies at the beginning was difficult. No longer discarnate, we had to focus on negotiating
