that the bullet enters the barrel, surging out of my chair and pushing the man’s gun hand upwards with my left hand as my right reaches towards his face?
I wonder where my anger has gone. It’s been replaced by a terrible sadness, a bone-deep weariness. There is so much desperation in this world, played out at the margins, hardly disturbing the surface. I wonder, not for the first time, whether it really is possible for me to die in another’s body, or whether I’ll just wake up somewhere else, as someone else, when it’s all over.
I guess I’m about to find out.
The instant the heel of my right hand touches Franklin’s forehead, I see —
— everything that is running through his head in technicolour. The face of his exacting wife, coldly beautiful, expensively maintained; the memory of when each son was born, both now in their late teens, both taking after their brunette mother in looks, in attitude, with their constant want, want, want; the first dog Franklin ever owned; the funeral of the first person he ever knew to die; a marketing presentation where the audio system failed, leaving him speechless before an audience of hundreds; his first promotion; an argument with his father that resulted in blows and a rift that never healed; the moment he was fired and told to clear his desk out within the hour. There’s his fear, too, that he might be suffering some kind of stroke, some kind of seizure. Just a jumble of ordinary things; the quantum of a life reduced to mere seconds, mere flashes; a sound and light show amped up by adrenaline, by the belief that he will shortly depart this life and it will all have been for nothing.
I sense, too, the malakh’s misery, pain and rage as it uses Franklin as the blunt instrument of its wrath, fighting me for control of the gun.
I want to die! it shrieks inside my mind. Why won’t you let me die?
Weak as it is, the creature has amplified Franklin’s physical strength by a thousandfold and I almost cannot hold him back as I reply into the space behind his eyes: This is not the way. We cannot be killed by bullets, we cannot be killed by weaponry. The body may perish, but the spirit will live on, wounded, twisted, marked by what it has seen and done. Our kind may only kill and be killed by each other. Set the gun down, leave him. This is not the way.
The three of us are locked in a physical struggle for what seems an eternity.
Though it can’t be, can it? Because it all happens in the time it takes for a gun to fire, for me to deflect the man’s firing arm away, for a bullet to lodge itself harmlessly in the ceiling above our heads.
As Franklin tries to pull the trigger again, the malakh howling and raging behind his eyes, I snarl into his face: ‘Mors ultima linea rerum est, Franklin. Death is everything’s final limit. If you do this, there will be no turning back. You condemn more than just yourself. Those children of yours; that wife you’re so terrified of failing? You end your life, then you also end theirs as they know it. It all changes in the instant. Make something more of the present, you fool.’
The gun we’re grappling over is hot to the touch and wreathed in the smell of cordite and death. I feel the malakh as a tornado inside Franklin, clinging on grimly to his living body. It doesn’t seem as if either of them can really hear me, both are so wounded and empty. They seem unaware of their dingy surroundings; the five other people in here that Franklin chose to take prisoner on a random, sunny, summer’s morning.
Without knowing why or how, I roar into the space inside Franklin’s head: Exorcizo te!
And there is a blinding flash of light, brighter than magnesium when it burns, brighter than lightning come down to earth. So brief that no one in the Green Lantern takes it for more than a flash of sunlight. But I know what it is. And I know that it’s gone, the malakh is gone. Gone back into the wide and pitiless world to wander for eternity without respite.
Chapter 10
Franklin drops his gun arm, drops the gun, racked by heaving sobs. I lift my right hand from his brow, let my left fall back gently to my side.
He doesn’t look at me as he wails, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’
Still weeping, he bends and wrestles the fallen gun back inside the inner breast pocket of his suit jacket, then unlocks the front door and bats his way through the plastic curtain, leaving the cafe as unceremoniously as he’d entered it.
Sulaiman gives me a long, level look and glances down at the watch on his left wrist. ‘It is time to pray,’ he says pointedly, standing up and heading for the kitchen. ‘Time to giveanks to God, unbelievers, for you have been spared. For now.’
The door to the kitchen swings shut behind him, and Reggie, Ranald and Cecilia look at each other, at me, with white faces.
Ranald staggers out hugging his computer bag. Not cocky or composed now, no.
He is followed in short order by Cecilia and Reggie, who each grab a hodgepodge of personal items and leave without saying when or whether they’ll be back.
I’m in the mood to talk. Near-death experiences can do that to you, I find. But there’s suddenly no one left to talk to.
I head into the kitchen, where Sulaiman is calmly rolling out a prayer mat and listening to tinny, Arabic- sounding music on a portable radio.
I don’t know where the words come from, but I say, ‘This is the salah that you are doing? The ritual prayer?’
He nods. ‘That is the name some give it.’
I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a devout Muslim at prayer before and I’m fascinated by the absolute stillness and devotion in Sulaiman’s face. For one so large, he moves near silently as he folds his frame down upon the colourful mat he has placed in one tiled corner of the cluttered, greasy kitchen.
I lean against the wall near the portable red fire extinguisher and the ragged poster that exhorts all who read it to: Wash Your Hands! ‘I should think there would be an extra element of gratitude today in your prayers.’
‘What came to pass was already within His contemplation,’ Sulaiman says quellingly, his dark eyes flicking up to meet mine for an instant, ‘and so no “extra” thanks need be given. It has simply occurred.’
I shake my head and walk back towards the swing door. ‘Fatalist,’ I say good-naturedly, though it’s meant as a kind of insult.
‘Blasphemer,’ Sulaiman shoots back from his position on the mat, forehead to the ground.
I pause at the door. ‘I know plenty of . . . people like you. Who have an unwavering belief that every step in the narrow, bitter little lives of people like Franklin Murray is pre-ordained and inescapable, that free will does not come into it. If things really are pre-ordained, and I hadn’t stepped in to save you, then you might be dead now.’
Sulaiman exhales. ‘Ah, but your act itself — was it not pre-ordained? What sets you apart from any of us? Do not speak to me of “free will” for we will never see eye to eye. My God is a jealous god. His will prevailed, as it always does.’
I glare down at his broad back. ‘I like to think that I’m of all faiths rather than just one in which choice appears to form no part of the equation.’
Though, if truth be told, I am so blank inside that I don’t recall the tenets of my particular belief system, or whether I even have one.
Sulaiman raises himself onto his knees and gives me a challenging stare. ‘No,’ he says slowly. ‘I see into your heart, and I see that you are a person of no faith and that is how you have come to be here. Now leave me,’ he says dismissively, bending gracefully towards the ground once more. ‘For you have a habit of disturbing the peace of all those who surround you.’
I look at him sharply but his eyes are closed. And I wonder how Sulaiman can claim to know Lela so well if he’s been here just one month.
Frustrated, I head out of the kitchen, back towards the front counter.
When Mr Dymovsky returns, a box of tomatoes balanced on one hip, plastic bags of produce hooked through
