The Angel's Cut (24 page)

A
couple of months after he'd moved back into Flora's house, Xas was coming home one morning, at around three. He'd been with Cole, and hadn't showered. He was tacky, reeking, sated, but depressed. He'd caught the streetcar that came up Pacific Avenue, not the one that stopped on the Venice shore. He was taking the long way home, thinking.

He was on a dark stretch of road, at a point equidistant between two streetlights, when he heard the whistle of wind through long pinions. Without looking back, he dropped down onto the tarmac.

Lucifer swooped, and missed him. Didn't just miss, but miscalculated. As Xas dropped, Lucifer followed him down.

An eagle that lands on a rabbit uses its momentum to carry the rabbit away. It dives, drives its talons through furry skin into flesh, then lifts off again. Lucifer must have aimed to do something like that—seize Xas and push off from gravity by vaulting up from the springy divot of the angel's
upright body, taking that body with him. But Xas ducked, and Lucifer extended his reach, and, because angels always had the lazy habit of not troubling too much to correct movements that might result in collisions—for collisions, though painful, never had ongoing consequences—when Lucifer's snatch missed he was too low, and going too fast, to correct his position. The tips of his long top wings came into contact with the ground, and he flipped and tumbled, limbs thumping the tarmac, pinions popping, a momentous tangle of flesh and feathers.

The archangel skidded and rolled the whole length of road to the next streetlight.

As for Xas—Xas had ducked only from reflex. He hadn't a hope of eluding his brother. He straightened and continued along the road, his shadow preceding him, for a car had appeared behind him.

The archangel was sorting himself out. He rose, unfurled his wings and flexed them gently.

The car's brakes squealed and its headlights slewed away. It stopped, slant on to the kerb. Its driver emerged and stood in a patch of radiance from a street lamp, eyes shaded with one hand, peering.

It was a quiet street. On its left the houses backed onto a canal. Beside Xas was a hedge with an arched opening, a white-painted gate, and a sign advertising the services of a piano teacher. For a desperate moment the angel imagined that, beyond that gate, there might be somewhere to hide.

But Lucifer simply stood waiting, and Xas came on, step by hesitant step.

When he was finally within reach, Lucifer seized Xas under his arms, crouched, and sprang away from the ground. Xas looked down past his helpless, dangling feet to watch the road recede, an illuminated strip of smooth tarmac. He saw the greenish flares of lawns, torched by houselights, the glossy black thread of the canal, the beachfront and boardwalk, the crowns of phoenix palms. He saw shop awnings, strings of coloured lights, lamps on ships moored off the coast. He saw the wasteland smeared with the thick shadows of live oak windbreaks, bright water flashing in its reed beds. He saw the peninsula, the oilfields' glow, the oatmeal-textured, weed-choked waterways. The flat tarpaper roof of a church passed beneath them, a pledge written there, meant to be read by God, or by pilots flying inland:
Christ the Lord is King
.

Lucifer didn't move his grip to take hold of Xas with any of his wing hands, even when he caught an updraft and was gliding, only steering himself by tilting the flight feathers of his top wings, the others spread out around him. The archangel's glide was slow, he almost floated rather than flew, and still he kept Xas at arm's length, carrying him as gingerly as a small child might a kitten.

Xas's hands were free, though, and he took hold of what he could reach, as if in fear of falling. He wrapped one hand around the steely striated muscle above the archangel's right elbow; the other grabbed a hank of Lucifer's gritty, knotted hair.

Not a word passed between them. It was silent in the air, the wind in the archangel's feathers making just enough noise to mask any sounds rising from the world below. They
hung above the Hollywood Hills until Lucifer chose where to land, where he perhaps judged they might be undisturbed. He began to descend and Xas made out patches of green, like blankets pulled as taut as trampolines between regularly placed lights. He saw velvety grass lawns and woolly green treetops, the warm scales of terracotta tiled roofs, two opalescent illuminated swimming pools and, further from the buildings, dark lawns under the humped mists of sprinkler spray. Xas wasn't sure at the time where it was they came down. Later he worked out that they had landed on a green at the Wilshire Country Club.

The archangel dropped Xas a moment before touching down himself. Xas's boots made deep prints on the soaked green. They stayed where they landed, neither of them moving to get out from under the veil of sprinklers. The water beaded on the archangel's wings, then began to run in rivulets. It tapped on Xas's dry jacket, till the leather grew sodden and heavy. They faced one another—and God was there too, in the faintly lit mists, the ticking sounds the turf made as it drank, the sizzle of spray.

Lucifer said, ‘You've given up taking your short cut.'

‘I've been away, why should I take up all my old habits?'

‘You've resumed living with your friend, that woman, and sleeping with some man—is it Conrad Cole?—the man whose smell is all over you. The only thing you've given up is your short cut.'

Xas's wet rattails dripped onto his nose. ‘I've expected this,' he said. ‘I've been waiting. Flora told me that someone had asked after me. Someone who left her anonymous
notes, including one message inscribed on an awning torn from a shop front.'

Lucifer smiled, and Xas imagined running away across the squelching ground. He saw himself doing it. He would disappear beyond the lights around the arena of the green. The trees surrounding the green were elms, tall, though they had looked low from the air. There was a stable somewhere nearby, for Xas heard a horse whicker, and another answer it. Dignity didn't matter between him and God. So he would run, he'd pick up his feet and go. Perhaps the horses were housed in a stone building, behind doors with strong bolts. Perhaps their stalls were narrow and deep; too deep for an archangel to reach into.

Lucifer waited, his wings silvered by running water, calm, and beautiful with some kind of surety more personal and permanent to him in that moment even than the presence of his Father. ‘There's something I want to ask you, Xas,' he said.

‘All right. Go on. Get it over with,' Xas said.

The archangel said, ‘I want to know why
you
think I cut off your wings.'

‘I'll tell you, then you'll lie to me.'

Lucifer's forehead creased with perplexity. ‘I know you've immersed yourself in the local traditions, but is it really necessary for you to go so far as to suppose I always lie?' Then, ‘Ask me why I cut off your wings.'

‘You cut off my wings so that Sobran could keep me,' Xas said. ‘That's what you told him. And God let you do it because I'd offended Him. My lack of chastity was blasphemous. Because I'm a copy—a copy of that other one.'

‘Ah,' said Lucifer, then he smiled and said, ‘Since you're still being unchaste perhaps I should cut off something else.'

Xas's body remained motionless in the steady chilling spray, but his mind seemed to sidle away. He didn't want to think about why They'd chosen to maim him—God and Lucifer. He must find something to say to stop Lucifer telling him.

He removed his jacket and tossed it out of the range of the sprinklers. The drops began to soak his cotton shirt, so that a transparency seeped from his shoulders down. He said, ‘Whatever reasons you had, I don't know how relevant they are now. You see, once my wings had gone, and I was on earth all the time, for maybe forty years things went on as they always had, then, gradually, many new things began to appear. For instance, there were multiple copies of books, and mass-produced clothes—the sorts of stuff manufactured by speedy machinery. So—say—a new zinc bucket would weigh less than an old wooden one, and could carry more apples, so the wooden bucket wasn't mended and was finally thrown away.'

‘I'm being patient,' Lucifer said, ‘but I'm missing your point. To go with your wood versus zinc analogy—God might seem to disappear, but would be growing again somewhere like the timber for a wooden bucket. He's always there, whatever shape He takes.'

‘I don't mean that,' Xas said, ‘though it's an interesting thought.' He heard the horses again, whickering nervously to one another. They reminded him of something he'd noticed. He said, ‘There were five years in which the
hundreds of thousands of horses in Paris reduced in number to only a few hundred, because of automobiles. I lived through all those different disappearances and changes, and I kept changing too, even after that first alteration.'

Lucifer frowned at him. ‘Are you trying to say that your wings weren't
taken
but simply disappeared, like the Parisian horses? That there was no violence, only an “alteration”?'

Xas was silent.

‘Are you trying to say that since the world has moved on, in effect you're no longer the one whose wings were cut off?'

Xas said, ‘I know and feel many new things now. Nothing wonderful or exclusive. But what I feel is like—well—my shirt.'

‘You feel like your shirt?' Lucifer said. His mouth stayed a little open. His face relaxed completely and Xas was distracted by a hitherto unnoticed family resemblance. Lucifer looked like Michael.

Xas shook his head to clear it. He touched the fully transparent material under his collar, which was showing the dark cartilage of its celluloid stiffening. ‘This is a shirt, the same as other shirts,' he said, ‘and the library books waiting for me on Flora's window seat are the same books that are in many other hands. Scarcely anything is made specially any more—books copied for one reader, a shirt tailored for one body. Nothing I've learned lately is
special
, but it was bound to make other stuff vanish, as horses vanished from the streets of Paris.'

Lucifer said, ‘Are you saying that you're going to start forgetting things, including what happened to you? Including
how it felt to fly? Angels don't forget. This is all wishful thinking, Xas. If God is a horse He's also an automobile, and you can't make either of us vanish or recede merely by filling yourself with what this overproducing world has to offer.'

‘Vanish,' Xas echoed, softly, as if performing a rather wistful exorcism.

Lucifer dropped his chin again, and again the tension drained away from his face. He no longer looked at all formidable. He said, ‘Why did I cut off your wings?'

‘What is it you want? To confess?' Xas asked. ‘Or to exonerate God?'

‘I'd do
that
?' Lucifer took a few steps toward him, came close enough for Xas to be able to distinguish the noises the water made dripping from his wings and the sprinklers. ‘Why won't you answer God,' Lucifer said, puzzled, ‘when He's speaking to you?'

‘God can't make me hear Him.'

Lucifer looked intensely interested. ‘How long has that been going on?'

‘None of your business,' Xas said.

A man had appeared at the edge of the green. A greenkeeper possibly, come to shut off the sprinklers. The man was watching them—seeing a six-winged angel in conversation with a smaller human figure. The man was peering about him, perhaps looking for the camera crew. His as yet unrewarded search was probably the only thing keeping him conscious and mobile and able to finish what he'd come out to do. He stooped to a tap and wound it, shutting off the water.

The turf ticked, and silence seem to drift down over Xas in a series of diaphanous layers, each more muffling than the last.

Lucifer turned to regard the man, who was fortunately far enough away not to suffer the blow of the archangel's attention. He said, musing, ‘Why is it that just having something to do makes them so brave?' He seemed not to expect an answer—even from God—for he simply went on, ‘Can you really not hear Him?'

‘I really can't.'

Lucifer's lips parted again, and this time Xas could read the look. Lucifer looked impressed, and avid. He came closer.

Xas took several steps back.

The archangel came to a stop, but said, ‘I was holding you before. If I intended to hurt you I would have already.'

‘
You cut off my wings!
' Xas roared. The world turned a soft shade of red. He jumped at Lucifer, intending to tear at that body with his fingers and feet—and his teeth, even knowing what would happen. He'd do it. He'd bathe in his brother's toxic blood.

But Lucifer took a step back and Xas's fingertips brushed squeaking down a stretch of slippery feathers. Xas sprawled on the turf. For a second Lucifer's bare feet were before his face, just out of his reach, then Xas saw the toes splay, and press hard into the grass, raising mud. All six of Lucifer's wings swept down, so that Xas lay for a second inside a dark tent of feathered muscle. Then there was a loud crack and sheets of water leapt off the ground to follow the retreating momentous gravity of the archangel's body as he tore himself off the earth.

The water dropped back down and lay quiet as water should. Xas rolled onto his back to watch the archangel vanish into the darkness. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the greenkeeper keel over in a faint. The sound of the archangel's wing beats receded, grew faint, faded away. Xas lay for a few minutes on the sodden ground. Then he got up, retrieved his jacket, and set out walking away from the hills, toward the sea.

For Flora getting out of bed was a process. First she'd throw off her covers, using only her arms, and keeping her back firmly against the mattress. She'd roll to the edge of the bed and drop her feet onto the floor. Then she'd straighten her arms to move her torso off the bed. Each morning she would accomplish this series of manoeuvres with as little movement in her hips as possible. And still her scars pulled.