The Angel's Cut (36 page)

I kept on walking. A snake fled ahead of me, making a cross-stitch pattern in the sand.

When Xas's first friend the beekeeping monk died, he came to believe that God didn't after all save everything. That Heaven didn't want circus acts with circus performers. I offered to return him to Heaven, but he, Godlike, wanted more. He wanted back the people he loved. He wanted to call, and have them answer. He wanted them to be themselves forever. Godlike, he wanted that.

When I spoke to him in 1938, he talked about souls, and what God does with them. He came up with an abortive parable. He wasn't sure enough of what he thought, and his parable turned into a question. What he said was this: ‘Let us 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? What kind of lack couldn't be satisfied by
all this
?' And he had gestured around him at the moonlit flowers of Flora McLeod's paper road.

When I was far enough from the highway to judge that I couldn't be seen, I pushed off from the ground. My wings laboured till they caught the weak upward tendency of the new day's first thermals.

I would go back to Hell, and our cinema. I'd move its main projector, the DP70 Todd-AO I stole from the Newsreel Theatre in Los Angeles by carrying it off through a skylight one night in 1957. I'd wheel out the older projector and put on a silent movie—
Dance Hall Daisy
. I'd watch the young Flora McLeod checking her hair and waving hello.

There was a highway now on Flora's paper road, and an industrial park spreading on the airfield she'd crossed shortly before dawn one morning in June, 1929, whistling, and listening for her whistle to echo as if the twilight was a soundstage. Flora the film editor, who understood transitions, and understood time, and who once said to Xas that, when she was alone, she would sometimes sense an alteration, something like the soft click of a splice passing through the gate of her editing machine.

I put this story together from the testimony of the damned, and I used my imagination. I will continue to run it, listening for clicks. Angels never forget anything. There is no unwanted footage.