The Angel's Cut (28 page)

X
as, coming home late through the waste ground of the paper road, saw his brother waiting on the track near the back fence, a looming shadow against the southern horizon where, beyond Washington Street, the pumps of the Venice Peninsula oilfield hunched under the oily light of the lagoon.

Xas sat near the archangel and waited for him to speak. After a time he became aware of a muffled buzzing. It was O'Brien's snoring purr. Xas reached out, fingers punching through the crust on the dry sand, before finding the cat's soft vibrating body.

It hadn't rained for over a month. The wind was blowing across the parched country, and Xas could smell sage, wild mustard and manzanita in the canyons. Between gusts of those dusty scents, he smelled the thick roux of muddy water in the nearest canal, Flora's orange trees and, finally, his garden, the fatty stink of squashes, wilted lettuce, herbs,
flowers, laundry soap—for he'd been reduced to watering with greasy suds he bailed from the washing machine.

There was a carpet of cornflowers and poppies spilling down from the open gate—self-seeded from plants he tossed away when he thinned his flower beds. The moon was full and the poppies were partly open, their petals as crepey as the wings of newly hatched butterflies. The stars were bright and close and the night so still that Xas could actually hear the oil pumps' pushing heartbeats.

Though sunset was hours ago, the house would still be hot. All its windows were open, so Flora was home. She hadn't been home for days. She'd been with Crow. Xas didn't like coming home to an empty house, but he always did, to feed O'Brien. Xas hoped that Flora was fast asleep. He resolved to submit; to get whatever it was the archangel wanted over with quickly. Flora must not wake up, come out, and discover them.

After a moment Xas said, ‘Since you're not speaking to me I suppose you're making yourself known to God.'

‘He always knows where I am,' Lucifer said. ‘Whether or not you're near me. After all, it isn't a very big blind spot I'm in. I'm sure that when the sun is low in the sky He can see my shadow moving far ahead or far behind me as I fly.'

Xas listened to the oil pumps, O'Brien's vibrant circular breathing, and the contented creaking of ducks nesting in the congealing marsh. He practised patience.

After a time Lucifer said, ‘I am thinking of proposing to God that Hell gets a copy of every film.'

Xas shrugged. He looked at the open windows. The interior of Flora's house was as black and hot and uninviting as the insides of a carbon-coated oven. He kept an eye out for Flora, and continued to practise patience. It wasn't as if he was sleepy. And he had nothing to do the next day.

Lockheed had asked him to take a leave of absence in order to recover from an accident. Some weeks before he and his co-pilot had had to bail out of a burning plane. Whenever Xas was flying with someone else and had to bail out he'd always wait to see how the other person was before opening his own chute. That was his policy. He and his co-pilot had left the plane together but, because Xas was lighter, the other man was a little below him by the time they reached terminal velocity. He looked down and saw his co-pilot's parachute pack on fire, the flames pale and smokeless in the blue air. The man deployed the chute, and it didn't even have time to open before it was fully alight. Xas rolled himself into a ball and tried to race the man down. He uncurled now and then to steer himself nearer. He could see that the man was conscious, hanging onto the cords, looking up, and going down in a spiralling trail of sparks and smoke and fragments of burning silk. Xas finally caught the ends of the trailing cords. But he hadn't been watching the ground and he'd only seconds to think—maybe only one second to do the
right
thing. But he was thinking like an angel, so once he caught the man for a moment, by reflex, he tried to open his wings. He tried to open his wings, and felt all his muscles move and his scars smarting and only then remembered to pull his ripcord. Xas
kept hold of the man, but they weren't going slow enough when they hit the ground.

Xas understood what had happened, understood it thoroughly. He didn't have any quarrel with the facts—he just didn't seem to be able to come right afterward, so Lockheed stood him down.

Lucifer abruptly started speaking; explaining the origins of his plan. ‘That woman you live with once wrote me a note that mentioned a “Conrad Cole”. I was curious, so I found him in a movie magazine. I read some of those magazines. Then one of our brothers gave me Sergei Eisenstein's “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” and “Methods of Montage”. For some years I read about film—though most of the printed matter on the subject is merely gossip and advertisement. I didn't see a film till 1934, when they opened the first drive-in.'

‘I guess for you it was more of a hover-over,' Xas said.

Lucifer was quellingly still and quiet for a time, then he began to talk to God. Xas listened to his brother's end of the negotiation. Lucifer asked that Hell receive an eleventh copy of any film copied ten or more times. Xas could tell that his brother supposed ten was a negligible number. Xas thought of various people in the Hollywood colony making movies of their parties, picnics, and tennis matches. Ten was too few. Hell would eventually drown in children's birthdays and pool parties, beach barbecues, beauty contests, and beloved dogs begging and rolling over and playing dead. But Xas didn't say anything to warn Lucifer. He just let his brother make a mistake—he even enjoyed it.

Lucifer concluded his negotiation. He stretched, adjusted his wings, but didn't get up. This subtle but thick rustling roused O'Brien, who made a melodious chirping noise, before resuming his blissful purring.

Xas frowned at the cat, and his brother remarked, ‘Your forehead looks like sheet music, without the music.' The light was behind Lucifer's head, so his smile was audible rather than visible. ‘So,' he said, ‘to return to our conversation of seven years ago—why did I cut off your wings?'

Xas tried to get to his feet, and Lucifer put out a hand and held him down. ‘Shall I help you?' Lucifer said. ‘You went to Heaven to find the lost page of Jodeau's brother's suicide letter. Jodeau's wife had burned it because it accused her of murder. She burned it, and therefore sent it to Heaven, where all destroyed originals go. You went to Heaven to find it. To steal a tiny bit of lost truth.'

Xas was very surprised that his brother knew this.

Lucifer took note of his surprise and explained that, of course, Leon and Celeste Jodeau were in Hell. ‘Where I spoke to them,' he said.

Xas had known his lover's brother only through Sobran's stories about him—stories, worries, and a profound and puzzled grief. But, some ten years after he'd lost his wings, Xas had entered the Jodeau household as a tutor to Sobran's younger sons. He'd lived under Sobran's roof—though only shared a bed with his lover when Sobran was away overnight in his room at Château Vully. Xas had known Celeste Jodeau. He'd been careful with her, and kind to her. He hated to think of her soul in Hell and under interrogation,
her thoughts and acts examined, all of them irredeemable, not in themselves, but by virtue of her damnation. Everything Celeste was had been thrown away whole—her cruelty, her selfishness, her duty, her generosity, a whole murderous, motherly person excised from the future, from God's promised Kingdom, if not from the story of the world. Lucifer had questioned Celeste and, no doubt, had judged her as God had. Judged differently, for he was the Devil after all, but judged nevertheless. Xas imagined the interview. He imagined Celeste's despair, and Lucifer's cold, angelic certainty.

‘Why would you want to talk to them?' Xas said. ‘Celeste and Leon?'

‘Well—I had time,' Lucifer said. ‘I'm only letting you know what I already know so that you won't leave anything out.'

Xas shut his mouth and remained stubbornly silent. He stared at his brother trying to make out his expression in the moonlight. Lucifer didn't prompt him again, but neither did he lift his restraining hand.

Xas said, ‘I knew Celeste Jodeau. I keep wanting to ask after her, to say, “How did she look?”'

It wasn't a real question, but Lucifer answered it. ‘She looked like her homeopathic self; like the memory of a remedy. She looked how damned souls look when they remember their mortal lives.'

This was apt and cruel, and Xas found himself saying, ‘There really isn't any afterlife, is there?'

‘Are you asking the Governor of God's prison whether he actually has any inmates?'

‘I don't mean “actually”. Actually there is an afterlife. But there isn't in the way that mortals suppose there is.'

‘Hell is Hell,' said Lucifer.

‘You know what I mean. I don't mean just that Hell is hopeless.'

‘I know that you have your own heresy. That God doesn't after all save everything.'

‘Yes. But imagine—' Xas began. He caught the haughty, quizzical expression on his brother's face and turned away from it. ‘Imagine the atheists are right,' he said.

‘Why would I bother to imagine what isn't true?'

‘To discover what is—the spirit of the promise.' In trying to explain himself, Xas came out with a parable. ‘Let's say that human bodies are planes. The purpose of a plane is flight. A soul is a flight; it is the purpose of a body. But what is it that flies? I don't think you can separate a thing and its purpose. But that's what God does, He winnows things from purposes and keeps only purposes. Which makes me wonder—what was it God lacked that He called for light? And what kind of lack couldn't be satisfied by
all this
?' Xas gestured around him at the welcome mat of self-seeded garden flowers, and silver billows of moonlit lupin.

Lucifer said, musingly, ‘Although you now seem to believe once more that God made the world—called for light—I think you may still be more of a heretic than I am.'

Xas waved this away as an irrelevancy, then said, eager, ‘Okay—imagine the atheists are right. It's easier to see how the world works for atheists when the world is bad. So—imagine the bad world.'

Lucifer laughed. ‘All right, I've got that, the
bad
world,' he said. Then, ‘Go on.'

‘An atheist who lives through evil times must try to make sense of things without recourse to the idea of God, without a comforting authority, a fixture in the sky from which to suspend their final judgments. Without anyone to blame,
history
is the monster in their stories. History—immortal, capricious, remote, present everywhere. At best what they're left with—those atheists—after their struggles with history, are their hopes. Their hopes like some cross between a coffin and a boat, a vessel to carry their treasure away somewhere. But if I say “coffin” it sounds as though I'm talking about the ceremonial afterlife of interment and memorial. I'm not. All the hopes are for is that moment of passing—to be there,
singing something
.'

‘Did you sing to Sobran when he was dying?'

‘No,' Xas said. He felt tired and discouraged. He'd supposed his brother was paying attention, but Lucifer had only listened, alert for the appearance of a gap in his defences. Xas sighed, and patiently finished his thought. ‘We should imagine there's no afterlife, because there is none for angels.' Then, ‘I can't trust God with my treasure.'

‘Because He let me cut off your wings?' said Lucifer, sly and persistent.

When Xas didn't respond, Lucifer made a sound of exasperation and got up. This startled O'Brien, who turned into a stiff, barbed fury, and sprinted away toward his basement bolthole. Lucifer's hand, which had only weighed on Xas, and held him in place, closed into a pinching grip.
The archangel picked him up, and clasped him close. Lucifer's scent—clean sunlight, spicy apple and fennel—was extraordinary. It made Xas feel weak, and a little crazy.

The archangel took off. His wings were loud and his progress was a series of pauses and accelerations. Then he caught a current of air several thousand feet up, and began to glide.

They flew along above the paper road as far as it went, down toward Playa del Rey, then turned out to sea. The archangel swooped and plunged, and once he banked, leaning against gravity as though barrelling around a solid and nearly vertical wall made only of air.

The wind was blowing from the southeast. It was a dry wind, a dirty wind, even several thousand feet up. Xas saw that they were flying in a pinched patch of clear air under a thick, flat-bottomed thunderhead.

Lucifer began to climb toward the cloud. Closer to, it was less defined, its edge filmy. But still it seemed strangely inert, not an airy thing full of water and electricity, but only a shadow, like its own shadow.

Xas knew that Lucifer was climbing toward the cloud as a precaution. For, though it looked passive as they passed along underneath it, the cloud suddenly ruptured, not with lightning or rain, but with a spray of fine particles of ice. The ice burst out and dropped onto and around and past them, then, hundreds of feet below, it hit the hot, dirty wind and evaporated. Xas felt the temperature change and pressure fall below them. He also felt Lucifer's lungs expand. The archangel sucked in an apparently endless breath, clasped
Xas even closer to him and locked his six rowing wings into one. The hands on Lucifer's two lower sets of wings seized the one above them, and closed like louvres to make two long instruments of coordinated muscle. Until that moment Xas had always thought the multiple wings were only for show—to make archangels look bigger and fiercer. But he learned then just how much redundant strength his brother actually possessed.

If Xas, back when he'd had wings, was hit by a downburst from a thunderhead, he would simply have resigned himself to being pushed into the sea. But Lucifer fought back. His wings locked, his wing beats slowed, but his wings described wider circles. He raised his face to the cloud and closed that final fifty or so feet to its underside, just in time to meet the blast of wind that erupted into the patch of lowered pressure directly beneath them. The wind hit them, and pushed them down. Lucifer's wings laboured, locked, powerful, but the downdraught slammed them into a straight plunge toward the sea. The archangel tucked his head in so that his chin touched Xas's crown. He was breathing hard, and his skin heated up, till it was hotter than human flesh, but still dry.