The Miracles of Ordinary Men (2 page)

He shrugged. The wings ruffled against his back. They were heavy. Why hadn't he noticed that before? “I just wondered. I was thinking about Father Jim. Thought I might go and see him, and I wondered if you knew whether he was still at the church. That's all.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “No. I don't know. I could ask my mother, if you want.”

“Don't bother.” He could ask Carol, but that would get her excited. Not as excited as she would be to find out that her son was sprouting the wings of seraphim — if, indeed, she could see them at all — but there were plenty of things that his mother didn't need to know.

“Is that really all?” Julie asked.

He fought the urge to snap.
If anyone has a right to be edgy here
,
it's me.
Instead he picked up his mat and ignored the rolling eyes this earned him. “Thanks for letting me stop by.”

“No problem.” Her voice was dry and hesitant at the same time. “Any time.”

He nodded, then turned and took three steps to the door.

“Sam?”

“Hmm?” The sudden thumping of his heart, the clammy slick of his hands.
Rocks
, his best friend had said. And still, here he was, hoping for the confession, the terrible mistake.

“Are you all right? You look . . . not well.”

“I'm fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

She nodded. “All right. If you see Father Jim, tell him I said hello.”

Tuesday

He called in sick, and went to see the doctor. Chickenhead, who hadn't been eating, came with him in the car — they could stop at the vet on the way home, make it a family affair.

The wings made driving difficult; they were larger than yesterday and pushed against the roof of the car. The brightness of the feathers sent beams of reflected light into his eyes whenever he glanced in the rear-view mirror. Twice, he almost ran into oncoming traffic. Chickenhead and her claws were the only thing that saved him.

In the doctor's office, he sat quietly in a corner and leafed through a stack of trashy magazines. The wings draped over each side of his chair, terribly unmistakable, terribly invisible. No one glanced his way or said anything. But people avoided the chairs beside him all the same. He sat and turned the pages and wondered what the doctor would say.

But when the doctor called his name, she said nothing. He put down the magazine and followed her through to the examination room, ducking slightly to fit the wings under the door. That,
oddly enough, got him a look. But she covered it quickly and ushered him into the third room on the left. He ducked under the doorframe again and turned to face her. She couldn't see the wings, he was sure of it.

The doctor was short and very pretty. She wore a yellow shirt under her lab coat and her hair was brown, like Julie's. “Mr. Connor,” she said. Her voice, if it had a colour, would be yellow too. “What can we help you with today?”

Help
.
No one could help him here. “I have a growth,” he said lamely. “It's hard to explain.”

“All right,” she said. “Where is it?”

“On my back.” He choked back a bout of hysterical laughter.
Five feet of wingspan
,
lady.

The doctor nodded, made a note in her file —
psych consult
wouldn't surprise him — and asked him to remove his shirt. He wiggled each wing through the haphazard holes he'd torn in the back and then, when it was off, folded the shirt so that the rips weren't showing. Here he was, in front of a pretty doctor in all of his soft, greyish glory. He turned his back to her eye and stified a shout when her hand went right through
the wing and pressed against his skin.

“These scars have healed well,” she said. “Who was your doctor?”

What? Scars?
“Ah . . . out of town,” he said, making it up as he went along. “Doctor Marriner?” What
the hell?

“Ah.” Her hands prodded his flesh. “Sometimes,” she said, “traumatic wounds like these take a long time to heal. It's not unusual for patients to develop odd sensations around extensive stitching.” More prodding. Then a pause. Sam could hear the doctor shake her head. “I can't see or feel anything here, Mr. Connor. But let's book you for an x-ray, just in case.”

On the x-ray table, he watched as the attendants fitted him with a protective bib, unconsciously avoiding the wings. The cartilage folded neatly against the cold leather of the table. He fought the urge to itch as a feather tickled the inside of his arm.

He was sure that the x-rays wouldn't show anything. He was right. The technician who came to take his iron bib away was young and bored. “You can change over there,” he said, and he pointed to the stalls. Then he left.

He couldn't fit the wings into the changing stall, so he dressed quickly in the middle of the room. The right wing stuck in its hole and for a moment he was paralyzed. Then it pushed through and the wing flexed of its own accord, several feathers dropping to the floor. He picked them up and stuffed them into his pocket.

In the car, Chickenhead hissed as soon as he opened the door. She didn't like waiting. He ran a tired hand along her fur and then snatched it back, surprised, when she turned her head and bit him.

Julie had never liked Chickenhead. Even then, pre-Max, pre-Einstein, she'd been a dog person. Maybe it appealed to her sense of charity. He'd stopped trying to figure it out. But given the choice, he'd choose Chickenhead any day, in spite of the biting. She
didn't slobber. And as long as he stayed on top of the kitty litter, no nasty smell. She had manners,
his cat.

Or perhaps not so much manners as personality
.

At the vet, the cat was quiet, calm, and detached. The vet and his assistant (who didn't notice the wings, but that was hardly surprising) cooed over the cat's fur and laughed when she shook herself after the exam. The air he knew so well didn't leave her face at all — if anything, she looked more disgusted with him when they left the office. She'd rung in at seventeen pounds.

Chickenhead. The fact that she wasn't eating (
try tuna juice
,
said the vet) was probably a good thing.

Monday

In the morning there was a fine layer of down on his sheets. He showered with the door open, the wings quivering in the cooler air but dry. None of his shirts would fit — they bunched and made him look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He settled, finally, on an old sweatshirt, the grey one from McGill that he didn't mind destroying. He took the kitchen scissors to it, twisted and turned and bent the wings through the holes. The entire process took him almost half an hour.

Dressed, he looked in the mirror and found himself wishing, not for the first time, that Julie still lived in the house. His face was almost as grey as the sweatshirt and there were bags under his eyes. A glamour touch-up would do him so well right now. Just a smidge of cover-up, a touch of blush to bring him back from the edge of dead.

He wore a jacket — the gangster trench coat, Bryan called it — even though it wasn't that cold. The wings could fold against his back and the bulk of the coat was just enough to disguise it. He was not prepared for questions.

At the school, he slipped in through one of the back doors and looked over his shoulder every few metres, like a thief. No one said anything. In the staff room, he waved away the jokes —
Pulling the Mafia act on the kids
,
are we?
— and kept the coat on. Sweat that was part heat and part fear began to collect in the small of his back. Dave, who taught in the Mathematics department, poured him a coffee and then, seeing his face, added a shot of espresso.

“Rough night?” Dave asked. The pat on Sam's shoulder was briefly sympathetic.

“Rough weekend,” Sam said, and left it at that.

In class he was quiet, distracted, just this side of short. He angled his chair so that his back faced the wall, and avoided the chalkboard. Some of his students shot odd looks his way —
What's with the coat
,
dude?
— but he ignored them and made the kids choose their own roles for
Macbeth
, instead of standing in front and reading as he normally would.

Halfway through the day, an early group of students surprised him. He'd removed the trench coat during lunch because his back was slick with sweat, and he was just about to put it back on when they tumbled through the door. For an instant he froze, terrified — the wings were longer than they'd been in the morning, and the feathers that peeked through the down were an unyielding, brilliant white.

But no one noticed. No one said anything. Just to be sure, he stood and flexed his shoulders so that the wings gave a half-hearted flap. And nothing. The students were engrossed in their conversation, and no one even looked his way. He folded the coat deliberately over the back of the chair, and then he straightened, and he taught.

His last class of the day was Modern English — Philip Roth and Martin Amis and Vladimir Nabokov, because once upon a time (when literature mattered, when he couldn't feel the weight of feathers on his back) he'd loved
Lolita.
The syllabus had enough Alice Munro and Doris Lessing to keep his female students from revolting. To date, he hadn't had any truants. Maybe that said something about him. Maybe it didn't.

His favourite student in this class was Emma, the petite redhead with journalistic aspirations. He was careful — even she didn't know. But he sought her opinion in discussions and he looked forward to her essays and he liked the sway of her hips. She had a lovely laugh.

Today, though, she walked in and looked straight at Sam, desperately nonchalant at his desk. No laughing — she looked puzzled at first, and then her face went pale. She sat at a desk in the back, as far from the front as space would allow.

He taught the class from his desk and dismissed them early. He stacked papers and watched Emma lag behind her friends. She waited until there were no students left and then came slowly to his desk.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, and swallowed. His throat was very dry.

“Is this an early Halloween?” and she forced a laugh, pointed to the wings. He felt them arch over his head and stretch as if in response to her question; two inches since lunchtime, it wouldn't surprise him at all.

“Not exactly,” he said. He blinked and her face swam in and out of focus.

“I see,” she said and nodded, as though that explained everything.

“I don't.” His voice was sharper than he'd intended. “I don't see at all.”

“Oh.” The word seemed very small. “They're real?”

“Yes.” Strange, the relief that rushed into his bones.

Unexpectedly, a quirk of her mouth. “You don't strike me as a particularly religious man.”

“I'm not.” He'd been Catholic, just as he'd believed in the Tooth Fairy. His mother still said prayers for him. They weren't helping, obviously.

“Maybe you should be,” she said. “Maybe it's, you know, a sign.”

This was surprising — he wouldn't have pegged her for a religious person, either. “I'll think about it,” he said, another attempt at nonchalance. He tossed a hand back to the wings and tried a crooked smile, his first of the day. “Might try to get through the week, first.”

“Okay.” She gave him a tentative smile in return, then left. Much later, he realized that he hadn't asked her to keep it a secret.

Maybe you should be.
Tomorrow, the Tooth Fairy would show up at his door with a bag of old teeth, dressed in rags and asking for change.

Sunday

He woke up with a stiff back, that was all. Stumbled into his bathroom and flicked on the light and there they were — greyish knobs of skin that unfurled from his shoulder blades and hung to just above his waist. He blinked and leaned in to the mirror. Close up, he could see tiny feathers, densely packed together and obscured in some areas by grey, fuzzy down. He splashed water on his face and looked again.

Wings.

He was hallucinating. He had to be hallucinating. He reached around and grasped as though expecting air, then shouted when his fingers touched a feather, all too real. A hint of cartilage lay beneath the fuzz. He followed that slight ridge up to where the growth met skin — the move from wing to flesh was seamless. His skin was both clammy and hot, fevered.

Chickenhead heard his cry and pattered into the bathroom. She hopped onto the toilet and watched him, her head tilted to the side. Her eyes grew wide and then narrowed; she batted at one wing and then licked her paw, as though it was no big deal.

“This isn't funny,” he told her, almost shouting. She raised a paw again and ran her claws through the feathers. It hurt, more than he could have imagined.

Bryan
.
It was the only thing he could think of. He'd stumbled into his apartment alone last night, but Bryan was the craftiest jokester he knew, and he lived half a block away. His hands shook so badly he could barely dial the number.

His best friend answered on the seventh ring, sounding half asleep. “Muh?”

“Very funny.
Ha ha.
”

“What?”

“I have down on my bedsheets. Extra points for getting in and getting it all done without waking me up. Now how do I get the damn things off?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The wings, Bryan. Is it Super Glue?”

Pause. “I'm coming over.”

“Don't bother. Just — ”

“Five minutes, Sam.” And
click.

Bryan was at his house in three, pounding on Sam's door as though he'd just called
911
. He'd run over in slippers and his flannels and when Sam opened the door expecting a yell, or at the very least a startled
What the fuck
,
all Bryan did was grab him by the shoulders and pull him in for a brisk, hard hug.