Something More Than Night (22 page)

First he called her a hooker, then he threatened her when she didn’t fall on her back with her legs in the air. Plus he called her brother a piece of shit. Molly decided she didn’t care if this asshole popped a vein in the brain. She wanted him to have an aneurysm.

She gave him the full force of her attention. “Go fuck yourself, jackhole. I am not in the mood.”

He blanched. After a moment’s pause he dropped his eyes, turned, and stumbled back to his corner. As he folded up his camp chair and stalked outside, muttering to himself, Molly noticed the pulsating glow of graffiti had grown dimmer. Biomimetic paint; it responded to changes in the ambient light conditions. The lobby was brighter now, suffused with a different glow. Molly couldn’t see its source, only that the shadows had disappeared.

She didn’t trust the elevators in this dive, which always smelled like taking a ride in a clogged toilet. She also didn’t feel like climbing twenty flights of stairs, which usually involved running a gauntlet of homeless squatters. In the past those had been her only two choices, either one coming with a real danger of assault. This time she took a shortcut through the Pleroma by stitching the inner lobby door to the fire exit on Martin’s floor.

Muffled voices came through the door to his apartment. It sounded like he was watching a video. That was encouraging. If he could concentrate on a video he couldn’t be too far gone. Unless he’d turned it on just to hear human voices. She did that, too, when she felt lonely. Molly raised her fist to knock, but then caught herself.

What in the hell was she thinking?

How would Martin react if he opened the door to find his dead sister standing there? What would it do to him? If his body wasn’t already full of chemicals, it would be within sixty seconds of her saying, “Hi.” How could she bring him comfort if the mere sight of her was sure to send him into a tailspin?

Even if she knew how to change her appearance, and she didn’t feel very confident about that, it wasn’t likely to do any good. How creepy would it be to have a complete stranger show up on his doorstep, spouting cryptic platitudes about death and continuance? Besides. For such a sweet guy, Martin’s distrust of people ran deep enough to border on psycho when he was strung out. He’d probably slam the door in her face. And, frankly, he’d be a fool not to.

It made more sense to scout out the situation before she approached him directly. She already knew how to go unseen and unsensed; that was her natural condition when traveling on Earth. She just had to get inside. Knocking was no good unless she wanted to freak him out; if Martin was unstable, opening the door to find nobody there would do him no favors.

But the door had a peephole. The glass fish-eye painted the lemniscate glow of a caustic on the opposite wall. Apparently the rain had stopped and the sun had emerged; Martin wasn’t the type to bother with shades or blinds on the windows. Molly touched a fingertip to the smeared reflection. She folded her body into a flophouse analemma and rode upstream against the flow of sunlight into Martin’s apartment.

She landed in the kitchen. And gagged. It stank of rotting food. Cockroaches scuttled under the pile of dishes when her invisible halo fell upon the sink. Ants seethed across the fried rice spilled from an upended takeout container on the counter.
I should have come sooner.

There was no division between the tiny kitchen and the main living space, just a demarcation where cracked and soiled linoleum became matted and soiled carpet. The empty bundle of blankets on the futon smelled of Martin and still retained residual body heat; he had to be nearby. On the wall directly facing the futon, characters cavorted in an unfamiliar animated show from India. If the wall had sensed her, she knew, they would have spun their hallucinatory dances around her. But that wasn’t what transfixed her.

A portion of the wall—the largest portion of functioning wall—had been set to show a few-second snippet from a New Year’s Eve party some years back, when Dad was still alive. It was a photo of Martin and Molly together. They were smiling for the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders. Martin’s eyes were clear, unclouded. That had been one of his better periods. Her hair had been longer back then. She was laughing at something Martin had said to the person behind the camera. She didn’t remember the last time she had worn those earrings, and wondered what had happened to them. The laughter and background hubbub of the party played on a continual four-second loop. Martin had used a black marker to draw a curly picture frame around the image.

A ratty length of yellow electrical tape held a piece of paper to the wall alongside the image. It was the program for Molly’s memorial service.

There was a memorial service? But who organized that? She didn’t belong to a church, and there was nobody left except Martin.

Oh, Martin.
Why didn’t I visit you sooner? Why didn’t I check on you right away?

Water pipes clanked in the adjoining room, through a closed door. Martin had gone to the bathroom. Vaguely aware that she had met Bayliss in much the same way, she turned so that she could see Martin when he opened the door. The wall hadn’t noticed her, and neither would Martin. Once she saw him, got a sense of his emotional state, she could figure out how to approach him.

But the door didn’t open. And then it still didn’t open, and then it still didn’t open some more. She heard a strangled sob, and then something on the air—under the mélange of decay and pharmaceutical fumes—carried a faint hint of the primordial sea. It tasted like the ocean, like salt, and rang like a crystal bell. A fallen teardrop.

Warily, Molly opened the door, then reeled from the miasma of sorrow and self-hatred that came roiling out of the bathroom. Her brother sat on the closed lid of the toilet. His head hung low, almost low enough to press his chin to his chest. He was sobbing. One hand held a syringe; it sloshed when he trembled. The other held the knot of a rubber tourniquet around his arm. He was locked in that position while desire and shame and confusion warred within him. The pall of grief overwhelmed even the funk of rotten food in the kitchen. Molly understood.

He’d come in here to shoot up because he couldn’t stand to do it in front of her photo. Martin didn’t want his dead sister to see him doing this. He wanted to be the brother from that New Year’s Eve, wanted to be worthy of her legacy, didn’t want to be the brother she’d once found unconscious and barely breathing. But he also wanted to die, because he was alive and she was dead because she had pulled him out of danger on an icy tram platform in Melbourne. The part of him that wanted to die of shame, that wanted to sink into a chemical forgetfulness, held the needle; the part of him that wished he were stronger sat on the toilet and cried.

The bathtub, and the floor alongside it, was littered with needles, rocks, sooty spoons, foil, and glass pipes. The needles smelled like the man downstairs, but the residual venom glistening on their tips bubbled with carbon rings wearing long slinky molecules designed to seduce receptors in the brain. But the syringes were empty. Their contents had disappeared into Martin.

Molly went to him. She couldn’t reveal herself to him, not yet, but she could comfort him. If she had come to him before now, the urge to provide succor would have overwhelmed her good sense, and a single touch would have killed this fragile man. But just as she’d known how to deal with the creep downstairs, she knew now how to temper the angelic with the mundane. Somehow she understood, intuitively, the spiritual alchemy of solace.

Martin slumped sideways when she put her arm around his shoulders. He leaned into her. He didn’t know he was doing it, didn’t know she was there. He hadn’t even noticed when she opened the door. But she held him all the same.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “I’m okay, Martin. I’m really okay.” The frequency of his sobs decreased. He shuddered and sighed. “I didn’t die in pain,” she cooed. “I’m free of anger and danger and sorrow.”

None of this was true, but it soothed him.

“Carry no shame. Carry no sorrow. You never failed me. You’re my brother, and I love you no matter what.”

This part was true. Martin shivered.

“Remember me, and be strong. Be the person you want to be. Strive to be the person you would have wanted me to know. And don’t be afraid to fail along the way.”

Oops.
That was the wrong thing to say. He straightened, adjusted the grip on the needle, and brought it up to the bulging veins in the crook of his arm. Molly leaned forward to puff one gentle breath upon the syringe. A freak cosmic-ray shower speared down from the upper reaches of the atmosphere; it penetrated the tenement and sundered molecular bonds. The syringe’s chemical cocktail became a harmless solution of saline and inert molecules. Martin injected himself with his own tears.

Molly sighed. Martin went slack. The empty syringe clattered to the tiles.

“You’re so tired,” she said. It was crushing, the weight of his weariness. He carried a dead sister on his shoulders. “Go to bed. Lie down and sleep.”

Martin struggled to his feet. He shuffled from the bathroom, unaware of how heavily he leaned on his sister’s ghost to make it across the living room.

“Lean on me. Lean on your guardian angel.”

She laid him on the futon.

“Sleep,” she whispered. “Sleep with untroubled dreams.”

And he did.

13

AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE

I collected my hat while Uriel stepped outside for a private chat with the Thrones. I was glad they hadn’t tossed me in the cooler; I wanted to owe Uriel bail money about as much as I wanted another hole drilled into my head. Owing favors to a Seraph is a bit like owing a shark dinner: sooner or later, it costs an arm and a leg.

But I was already in dutch. She’d sprung me. As to why, I couldn’t begin to guess. I liked this not very much. As tired as I was of the Thrones’ broken-record act, at least I understood their angle. But I didn’t have a line on Uriel’s play.

They returned. The bulls announced they were letting me go. I could tell this wasn’t their idea, and that they liked it not very much. Lots of that going around recently. But the Seraphim draw a lot of water in this town, so what Uriel wants, Uriel gets. Even if that means a penny-ante keyhole peeper like me.

She looked me over. “You’re looking better already.”

I straightened my collar. “Let’s dust, angel.”

She elbowed past the Thrones on the way out. I gave them a wink. One grabbed me by the arm. “Keep your nose clean, Bayliss. Next time, we don’t play so nice.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sell it to somebody who’s buying.” I shook my arm free, flicked the brim of my hat. “See you in the funny papers.”

Uriel had already passed from the Thrones’ Magisterium and was striding through the between-spaces of the Pleroma. I hurried to catch up. She had quite a pair of pipe stems on her. I waited until we’d put some distance from the hoosegow before saying anything.

“Thanks,” I told her. “I always said you flaming sword types were the real cream.”

“No doubt.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I’ve been around the block a few times, Bayliss.” She paused, frowned, looked me over. “Why ‘Bayliss’?”

“Why Bayliss what?”

“What sort of name is that?” It’s like I said: we in the Choir are big on proper names.

“It’s a swell name. And besides,” I said, “all the best ones were taken.”

The sun belched. The Earth’s magnetic field lines fluttered like gauzy curtains in an ocean-side bungalow. They cast rippling boreal light across Uriel’s ox muzzle and shone on eyes the color of lukewarm magma. But the glimmer of her wings put that grubby mortal light show to shame. Maybe I stared too hard, maybe she reminded me too much of Gabby, maybe she didn’t like me any more than the Thrones did. When she caught me staring, she flipped the lion pan in my direction and gave a little growl. I backed off; magnetic reconnection sent a stream of high-energy particles tumbling down the Earth’s polar well. Add a random smattering of skin cancer cases to my list of guilty burdens.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you a lift.”

“Generous of you.”

I hadn’t told her where I was going, but she didn’t ask. And it seemed rude to refuse the lady. Before I could give her the address she enfolded us in her wings, packed us into a six-dimensional sphere (one for each wing; three temporal, three spatial) and before I could say “boo” we stood on the doorstep of my Magisterial apartment. But I’d had my heart set on a visit to Flo.

Not too ungratefully, I suggested the diner. “I could warm my tonsils with a cup of joe. Getting beaten with a phone book takes it out of a guy.” Uriel didn’t go for it, so I poured on the honey. “I know the owner. I can talk a plate of bacon out of him, no charge.”

Uriel stretched, straightened her wings; dewy cobwebs everywhere sighed and wished for better starlight. Her eagle face yawned, clacked its beak. Its breath smelled musty, like it had been catching rabbits from forgotten corners of the universe. “I’m not keen to get grease stains on my pinfeathers,” she said.

I said, “No kidding. I’ll bet your dry-cleaning bills are murder.” But I gave up and made for the apartment all the same.

Somebody had paid a visit while I was out: the hair I’d hidden in the door frame had been dislodged. Whoever let themselves into my digs, they hadn’t noticed it. I tried not to let the satisfaction show, and wondered what sort of dope overlooks the oldest trick in the book.

Maybe they were too busy kicking down the door. The hinges were severed and scorched. Their sheared edges still glowed a dull nuclear orange, as though somebody had cut through them with something sharp and fiery.

“After you.” Uriel ushered me ahead with her sword.

I figured to find the place tossed, as the Cherubim had done to Molly’s digs. Imagine my relief, then, when all I found out of place was the chessboard by the window. Somebody had moved a piece. Even my pipe still smoldered in the ashtray where I’d left it.

She—I mean they, whoever they were—hadn’t come to toss the place. They’d come to drag me from my bed in the middle of the night. Only I wasn’t there; I was down at the station house with the Bobbsey Twins. Guess it ruined a good show when the Thrones put the arm on me.