John tripped backward in a startle, dropping the liqueur glasses. They smashed on the granite floor.
Like some blind bird, Tygo turned slowly to John, his face dead-looking, mercury gray. Around them the air pulsed with motion, as though spinning through fan blades. A pleasant breeze. But John noted in a slight panic that the window was not open. Even if it had been, it was November and the wind could not possibly be so warm.
He gripped Tygo’s shoulder and shook him. Tygo continued to face him with that horrible expression. John grew more and more alarmed. He lifted his hand and actually slapped Tygo across the face. No response. He yanked back his hand, shocked at himself. It was as though he had been driven to do it: he had not even known what he was doing.
Tygo loomed above the mirror, the black surface reflecting back nothingness. Where had his reflection gone? John choked. The small star tattoos on Tygo’s temples stood out, almost raised, like the hair of a hissing cat.
Suddenly Tygo began to speak in a bizarre language. Words John had never heard and could not understand. Each word seemed to be longer than the last. Quite a few had escaped the other man’s lips before John had the wherewithal to leap to his desk and pull out a pad and begin transcribing. They were strange to the ear and ungainly to write; he could not tell when one word ended and the next began. Frantic, he scribbled, setting down sound after sound, writing as phonetically as he could manage, and this continued for some amount of time, John was not sure how long, enraptured and terrified as he was to be receiving anything that even resembled a miracle.
It occurred to him momentarily that Tygo was playing him for the worst kind of fool, but he let this suspicion out of his mind as one might let a hound into the garden knowing full well it may dig up the flowers. This relinquishment oddly satisfying. Some time later, minutes or hours, John had no idea, Tygo’s words ran dry and he was himself again, alight with excitement and confusion.
He still stood at the mirror, drenched now in sweat. The first thing he did was wipe his brow with his sleeve. Then he sank to the floor and began, improbably, to laugh. John thrust his papers up to the candlelight and poked at them. “What is this?”
Tygo continued to laugh. “Angel language. I don’t know. You tell me.”
“But what did you see? You looked ghastly, like a corpse someone dug up! You must tell me. I’ve never seen anything like that. Were you putting me on? How did you do it?”
Tygo sighed happily and put his hands to his face. “I—I don’t know. It just … happened. Like before. For a long time nothing happened, I was just standing there feeling stupid. Then I was seeing these strange grids, one atop the other, with small portions of the grids laid out backwards. But after a while the squares on the grids flipped over and then I was seeing a whole idea, a whole world, and I could exist in angelic time. Inside an event maybe…” He trailed off, seeing John’s expression. He shook his head. “See, I told you before. It’s like explaining a dream.”
“No, no, explain. You have to explain,” John said, brandishing the paper maniacally. “I wrote down everything you said. I copied out the sounds of the language. We can figure it out. If you can recall any of the physical visions—perhaps we can match them to the words. I’ve spent my life studying arcane nonsense.” He laughed bitterly. “Did you … is this the Return?”
They peered at the papers together. The pages were awash with impenetrable syllables, each more inexplicable than the last. Stunned by the sheer unreadableness, they sat side by side in silence for some moments. Beyond them shards of glass sparkled in the weak light—the broken cups. At last John remarked in a mild voice, “You can’t know how it feels to watch a person truly experience the Sublime. I’ve waited all my life to … to see a miracle.”
Tygo nodded.
“If you are a con-man, I damn you, and you should be hung off the walls of the palace as a bounty for the seagulls. But if you are a visionary…” He exhaled. “I have never witnessed anything like that.”
Tygo nodded.
“Is this the Return?” he asked again.
Tygo pinched his temples with his fingers. “I don’t know.”
“What did you see?”
“I think we’ll need to do a very thorough study of these angelic words and how they correspond to the data you’ve collected so far—”
“That will take weeks. What did you see?”
Tygo met John’s eyes. “I saw what I saw before.” He took the papers and held them once more to the light, pointing to a scribble near the end of the transcription. “That word there. You haven’t written it right, but you got the general idea. I remember that word. I saw it in the first vision, too. That word is important. ‘Tellochvovin.’”
“What does it mean?”
Tygo shrugged. “That’s what you’re supposed to figure out.” He hesitated. “I do know what it means, technically. But not what it means, cosmically. If that makes sense.”
John frowned at him.
“‘Tellochvovin.’” The other man frowned back. “It means ‘falling death.’”
Thereafter, elated but also peculiarly overcome, they each drank more of the citrus liqueur. They took turns at the bottle, enough to stuff their heads with pleasantness and wonder at what had just transpired, and it was altogether confusing but mostly agreeable, until Mizar inserted himself into the room and began fretfully to sweep up the glass, reminding John of how he never took drink and shouldn’t he think of his health? John was then seized by an unreasonable aggravation and spent minutes lecturing the poor man on his negligence in regard to the matter of the
