Darker Angels

I wanted Aubrey to come out, to find me. To tell me I wasn’t being stupid, that there was something worth thinking about in my questions. I told myself that my hurt feelings were just jet lag paranoia.

A year before, I hadn’t even known that riders existed. Karen was seasoned and experienced; an expert. The expert. If she didn’t think my objections were worth considering, maybe I was being stupid, and was just too stupid to know it.

I’d gotten just about to the point of leaving Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake to work with Karen while I went off to some kind of home for the mentally deficient when I heard the footsteps on the path. For a half second, I thought it was Aubrey. Another footfall, like a word in a familiar voice, told me otherwise.

“You walked out,” Chogyi Jake said over the sound of the wind. “You’re angry.”

“Yeah, well…” I said.

Chogyi Jake nodded, squinting up into the darkness. Clouds scudded across the sky, glowing a dull orange from the city lights. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t either. His presence by my side felt like an affront at first. Who was he to come out and disturb my solitude? I didn’t come breathe down his neck while he was meditating. Was it so much to ask for a little time for myself? And then, slowly, painfully, chagrin. He was just standing there. It wasn’t like he was the one telling me I didn’t know what I was doing. And then gratitude. I took a deep breath, letting it seep slowly out my nose. It was a relaxation technique Chogyi Jake had taught me. I should probably have been doing it more often.

I was about to suggest we head back in and get this abduction on the road when he spoke.

“I don’t like her,” he said.

“What?”

“Karen,” he said. “I don’t like her.”

“Ex does,” I said.

“Ex has had different experiences than I have,” Chogyi Jake said. “I think there’s weather coming. We should check the forecast.”

“Why don’t you like Karen?”

Chogyi Jake crossed his arms. He was wearing sand-colored slacks and a buff shirt lighter than his skin. The stubble on his scalp was in real danger of becoming hair, and I noticed a sprinkling of white at his temples that surprised me. I’d never thought about his age.

“When I was first learning to embrace and accept my own anxiety and suffering,” he said, speaking very slowly, as if thinking each word twice before he said it, “I didn’t do a very good job.”

“The drugs,” I said. This was only the second time he’d ever mentioned his career as heroin user, but the first time had made an impression on me. He nodded. A gust of wind brought the smell of the lake and diesel smoke.

“Something happens when you’re a junkie,” he said. “You never really come back from it. You… try to pass for a normal person. If you’re good, you can fool people. Some people. But not another junkie.”

“You aren’t a junkie,” I said, meaning it as comfort or reassurance. As a way to say he was my friend and I didn’t care what he’d done.

Chogyi Jake grinned like I’d given him a puppy.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “That’s the point. And so is Karen. I don’t think it was drugs in her case, but there was something. All the things she does to try to seem normal? All the games she plays? I’ve seen them before. I’ve done them.”

“Like?”

“She is always slightly more approachable and friendly than anyone else in the room. She acts like you’re intimates when you’re in private, and disrespects you in public,” Chogyi Jake said. “She found the man in the group most open to being seduced, and she seduced him. She’s trying too hard.”

“I don’t see it,” I said. “I don’t see her acting all that different from me.”

Chogyi Jake lifted a single finger. In the dim light, he looked like a woodcut of a Zen teacher.

“Like you turned to eleven,” he said. “She’s trying to pass for you, but it doesn’t come quite naturally. I watch her, and I see the version of herself she wants me to see, but I also see that she wants me to see it. So I don’t trust her.”

“I think…” I said, then trailed off. I think you’re being paranoid. I think you’re wrong. I think you’re mistaking my desperate little sister crush on her for something weirder.

I think maybe I don’t like her either.

“Seduce is a strong word for it,” I said after a while.

“She started quoting Thomas Aquinas at him as soon as she knew he was a priest,” Chogyi Jake said.

“She did?”

He nodded. “I don’t believe any woman with necklines that low quotes Aquinas without a motive.”

Aubrey’s head appeared at the kitchen window, looking out into the darkness. I took a step toward him, then paused. Chogyi Jake stood beside me, still peering up into the sky, as if the coming weather might have written a message there.

“What do we do?” I asked. The wind rippled across the grass, the small waves like lake water seen from above. Chogyi Jake scratched his arm.

“That Karen is… damaged isn’t an argument that she is wrong,” he said at last. “I don’t have reason to doubt that the rider she is hunting is evil and merits destruction. There is no doubt that Joseph Mfume was a murderer and a sadist. And two loa have tried to kill you since we came to New Orleans. All of those suggest that Karen is telling the truth.”

“Fair point,” I said.

“If you restrict who you work with to the mentally well, you may find yourself short of allies. There are strong arguments against me. Or Ex. Aubrey. But don’t put your trust in her.”

“So I shouldn’t be seduced by her,” I said.

“Or cowed.”

I ran through the last few days in my mind. The way Karen put her arm around me whenever we were alone. The irresponsible near-manic glee in the way she’d led us into danger at Charity Hospital. Her dismissal of my concerns tonight. I’d accepted all of it.

“You’re saying I’ve been relying on the authority because she’s the authority. FBI badass, years of experience, actually has a clue what she’s doing, yadda yadda yadda,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you think that’s a mistake.”

“Yes.”

The wind paused as if it was catching its breath. In the moment’s calm, I heard Ex laughing inside the house. A cricket chirped tentatively from the shed.

“This plan,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“All right,” Chogyi Jake said.

“I don’t think Karen’s going to answer my questions. She hasn’t yet.”

Chogyi Jake smiled and nodded like I’d said something nice about his shirt. He was giving me the space to think my own way through this.

“So I have to figure it out for myself, right?”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I walked back into the house. Karen, Ex, and Aubrey were in the living room, talking intensely about how much free will a normal person had compared to someone with a rider. Or an animal with a parasite. I found my leather backpack, but my laptop case was beside the futon mattress I’d claimed as my own. I couldn’t get it and get out without passing through the living room, so instead of slipping away quietly, I brazened it out.

“What are you doing?” Karen asked as I headed for the door.

“I need to check e-mail,” I said. “The dead zone here is going to make me really nuts. You guys hang. I’m just going to hit a Starbucks or something. Back before you know it.”

Aubrey half-rose, then hesitated. I could see that he wanted to come with me, but I walked to the door without him. I’d learned the lesson of Charity Hospital. I might be going into danger, and I wasn’t going to have Aubrey be the shield for my risks, even if the risks were small. I was surprised when Ex objected.

“We should go with you,” he said. “We can’t be sure that Daria didn’t recognize you. Legba could be setting a trap.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, then headed out the door before anyone could follow me. Heading down the driveway in the minivan, I saw Aubrey and Ex looking out the picture window after me, and Chogyi Jake sitting in lotus position in the backyard, his eyes closed. I got to the main road, navigated my way south again, and turned up the radio. The DJ was talking about a night of wind and rain, but there was no particular fear in her voice. Mere storms weren’t going to faze a city that had survived a hurricane. The drowned have nothing to fear. I got onto the I-10, driving alone across the water.

The hum of tires against the temporary metal grating that the southbound bridge had instead of pavement was calming. The lake I passed over was almost invisible in the night. I turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the windows, inviting the thick, humid air of the real world into my hermetic little box on wheels. It smelled like rain. A police car sped past me, and the DJ played an old Pearl Jam song I hadn’t heard in years and I sang along at the top of my lungs. Twin rows of brake lights strung themselves out before me in the darkness. New Orleans rose up glowing beyond them.

All through my childhood, there had been rules that bordered on commandments. In my father’s house, we were supplicants and sinners whose only hope of redemption was in the obedience we offered to the Lord, and the rules and strictures and demands of God were spoken in the voice of Andrew Heller. I’d spent my childhood loving God because He demanded it and fearing Him because He was frightening, until one day the two finally came together in my mind and broke; God could not love me and still permit hell to exist. There was either eternal punishment or a loving and compassionate Creator, but I didn’t see how there could be both, and that one thin crack of doubt-barely visible in the eggshell perfection of my faith-broke everything. The rules of my father’s house stopped being the rules of the universe; the eye of God wasn’t always watching me. I could sneak out.

I still remembered those first, tiny, unremarkable acts of rebellion: sneaking out of my bedroom window and sitting on the back lawn at midnight, wearing only my second-best socks to church on Sunday, silently reciting the lyrics to “Walk Like an Egyptian” instead of the Lord’s Prayer at night. No punishment had come, and there had been a delicious, dangerous feeling. The hint that maybe I was actually free after all.

Now, driving away from Karen and Ex and Aubrey and even Chogyi Jake, I had a similar lifting and opening feeling in my heart. Of course I was afraid, and of course I was guilty. That was very nearly the point.

I drove to the French Quarter, put the minivan in valet parking in the hotel at which I no longer had a room, and pulled out my laptop. Two Google searches and