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Chapter One
Calliel
Calliel
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No
one on that fucking sidewalk notices! No one looks his way, no one blinks in
surprise, no one rubs their eyes, dumbfounded—nothing!
He's
surrounded by people on all sides! How can no one not have noticed that?
Then
again, I wouldn't have noticed either. Not then. I was just like these people.
I found myself almost as fascinated by them as him. I reminded myself that I
was witnessing the past, and stopped trying to interact with it. It was dead
and gone—just like I was about to be.
Of
that, I knew it—death—was coming: me hurtling down into the dark sea, and that
it was only moments away, in the present. But this wasn't memory I was
experiencing. I never experienced this in the past—Calliel's appearance. I was
having a vision, one that gently pushed me to trust it and let it engulf me
fully.
"I
want to be there when it comes. When death comes," I said. "I want to
be there for that last moment. I want to see myself splash down into the
sea."
I
couldn't believe myself. I couldn't believe I actually wanted to be there, falling in blackness, to feel
that fatal, final burst of pain. I briefly entertained the notion that my
faculties had been taken over (by Calliel? by God?), and that I was no longer myself, or sane. I took a moment to
remind myself: Calliel said I would feel no pain when death came. I clung to
that and went back to the notion that I was insane.
But
I knew I wasn’t. If anything, here and now, at the very end, I was more myself
than I had ever been at any other point in my life.
"I
want to be there when it comes. When death comes." That's what I had said.
And I felt in answer a very gentle, almost grandfatherly reply:
Yes.
I
felt it. And it wasn't just a yes. What it was I can't describe, and
don't care to try. In any case I was swallowed—no, cradled—by the vision, and I
trusted.
The
sensation of falling, of flipping and twisting, of cold howling wind
dissipated, disappeared.
~~*~~
He
was dressed in a dark brown longcoat and cowboy boots and carried himself like
a hero. The drizzle falling on him didn't seem to affect him one way or the
other. He marched up to the intersection, where he waited with a gathering
crowd. The WALK sign flashed, and he crossed. At the other side a man loudly
accosting passersby for change approached and said, "Dollar?"
Calliel
smiled. "What would a dollar buy you?"
"That's
none of your fucking business!" yelled the man, who stalked away.
Calliel
followed him. "Wait! Hold up!"
The
man stopped and wheeled about, glaring.
"You're
not homeless," said Calliel.
"What
the fuck you want with me, man?"
"You're
living with your sister and haven't found work in three years."
"Now
how the fuck would you know that?" demanded the beggar, who drew up close,
his eyes crazy.
"You're
an artist—a poet."
The
man pulled in even closer. "I don't know who the fuck you are, but I'll
cut you and let you bleed out all over this sidewalk, you hear me? I don't give
a fuck if I go back into the system, fuck
you!"
Calliel
didn't seem intimidated. (Why would he be?) He reached inside his pocket and
pulled out a clean, crisp twenty dollar bill.
He
didn't take it out of his wallet. I don't know if he even had a wallet. He
pulled the cash out of his pocket just as if he'd wished it there, or knew in
advance that he'd be facing this man.
"Tell
you what," he said. "Take this twenty. But don't spend it on food or
rent or booze. Spend it in there—"
He
motioned with his head at the used record and CD store just a couple doors
away.
The
man looked, turned back around. "Why the fuck would I do that? I need to eat. And my sister is about to kick my
black ass to the curb if I don't give her rent!"
"Take
this twenty and spend it in there. Get a CD. Take it home and listen to it.
Then write a poem—the first poem that comes to mind. Work on it till it’s
finished. I don't care if it takes you all night or the rest of the week. Do it
with all the love that's in your heart, and I promise you all your worldly
needs will be taken care of, your sister's too."
The
man stared at him as though at a lunatic. He backed up a step. I yelled,
"Do it! Do it, you dumb motherfucker! C'mon! Take it! Take it!"
Of
course, no one could hear me. Because I wasn't really there.
Calliel
extended his hand with the twenty in it. "Take this twenty, write that
poem, and then come back here with it and have the first person you see at the
cash register read it. I promise you this twenty dollar bill will come back to
you ten thousand times over."
I'm
not sure the man actually heard the end of Calliel's declaration, because he
snatched the twenty out of his hand before he finished speaking and hurried out
of sight, shouting, "You're a crazy
motherfucker!"
"Do
it!" I repeated. "Do it, you ... god-damn!"
Being
an angel is a high-stress occupation, I decided right there. It must be like
social work or teaching (which was my chosen career), with just as much
rejection and burn-out. I wondered if God had to deal with frazzled cherubs
coming to Him and saying, "I can't do this anymore. Those asshole humans don't listen!"
But
Calliel didn't seem fazed by the encounter. He watched the man disappear into
the crowd and then kept walking. At the trolley stop he sat. The southbound
Blue Line pulled up minutes later; he boarded it and sat again.
He
seemed to know where he was going, and why wouldn't he? The trolley lurched
forward and he visibly relaxed.
I
watched him from my vantage point over the empty seat across the aisle from
him. I floated like a helium balloon. Or—it felt like floating. In any case, I
didn't have a body. I was more like an unseen point of consciousness, one that
was attached to him. Where he went I went.
I
used to ride this trolley five days a week. I wondered how many times other
"points of consciousness" were there in times past, and if they saw
me, and if so what they thought of me, if I'd made an impression on them. What
would they have seen?
I
didn't want to think about it anymore, because I knew, and compared to the
angel sitting there, gazing out, I had to have looked pathetic, hopeless.
Because I had been.
Oh,
don't get me wrong. I wasn't a gangster, and I didn't dress like a bum. I had
spent my life as a researcher and teacher, and dressed as such: usually a
nondescript sweater over a long-sleeved shirt, usually white, and brown slacks,
usually corduroy. I washed every day and smelled clean. I was a citizen,
harmless and harmlessly attired.
And
being a citizen means having a body that merely takes up space and is in no way
remarkable. It means anonymity and conformity and dressing appropriately in
order to maximize both. It means doing what all citizens are supposed to do,
which is to simply and quietly wait for death.
For
most of the latter half of my life I was a great
citizen.
Calliel
wasn't dressed as a businessman, nor was he dressed like a tourist. And he
certainly didn't look like the riff-raff everywhere around him: the gangsters
with pants halfway down their asses, the hobos and bums, or the rest—of which I
had been a card-carrying member—in their forgotten and forgettable get-ups.
Calliel
was no citizen, and his clothes, and the way he wore them, showed it.
The
trolley stopped, and on it stepped a woman with wild, frazzled brown hair and
deep wrinkles under a heavily made-up face. She spied him and sat next to him
as the doors closed and the trolley got on its way.
I
wondered what would happen if someone sat in the empty seat I invisibly hovered
over. Would I be inside the person? Would I feel what they feel, hear their
thoughts? I wished someone would come and sit here so I could find out. But as
luck would have it, no one did.
"Have
you heard the Word of God?" asked the frazzled woman.
Calliel
glanced at her. "What Word would that be?"
"The Word!" she cried, happy at the
chance to preach. "The
Word!"
"The
Bible," said Calliel. "Is that what you're referring to?"
"
'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever
believeth in Him shall not perish but haveth eternal life.' That Word!"
"God
has only one son?" he asked, puzzled.
"One
and only one," said the woman solemnly.
He
nodded contemplatively. “No daughters?"
"Only
a Son," said the woman with a trace of irritation in her voice.
"But
aren't we all children of God?"
"Of
course ... of course we are," said the woman with more irritation.
"But
if God had one son and no daughters, how is that possible?"
She
held up, exasperated, then just pretended not to have heard the question.
"Have
you acknowledged Jesus Christ as your Lord and Sav—"
"Your
husband drank himself to death five years ago," he said.
During
my life, I was accosted by these religious whackjobs probably twice a month.
You didn't make conversation with them or look even remotely in their
direction. They'd try to make me talk or look at them, and I refused.
Eventually they’d get up and leave. Not all the time, but enough to tell me it
was an effective strategy.
Never
had I seen one of them speechless like this woman was now.
"You
remember him fondly," Calliel went on, "but you really shouldn't.
Carl was an asshole, which is what you thought of him when he was alive. He is
no more."
He
patted her hand, which rested on her knee.
"Neither
belief nor the Bible nor going to church will get you into Heaven, Kendra. Want
to get into Heaven? Have the courage to be a quiltmaker. That's what you've
always wanted to be ever since you were sixteen and your grandmother showed you
how. That's what you were put on Earth to be—"
And
that’s all the advice he got out.
Kendra
lit up like a July Fourth fireworks display that goes up all at once. It isn’t
worth recalling everything she shrieked save the repeated (and I do mean
repeated) charge of, "STALKER! YOU'RE A STALKER! YOU'VE BEEN FOLLOWING ME
AROUND! STALKER! STALKER!"
Calliel
sat unfazed. He gazed at the woman, his countenance a mix of pity and
annoyance.
The
trolley got to the next stop, and it was there that police boarded and hauled
her off in handcuffs. She had lost her mind, or what was left of it.
"DEVIL! YOU'RE THE DEVIL! SATAN! SATAN! HE'S SATAN!"
The
trolley's doors closed, muting her shrieks, and the train lurched forward once
again. Calliel gave short smiles to folks who turned to look and identify
"Satan." One woman couldn't keep from staring at him; for her trouble
he held up both index fingers to his temples and gave a playful growl, baring
his teeth. She turned away, horrified. He chuckled.
Ten
minutes later, at one of the stops in National
City , an MTS security guard boarded. Like a kennel
full of Pavlov's dogs, the entire car pulled out their trolley passes or ticket
stubs. All but Calliel.
The
guard got to him, grunted lifelessly, "Ticket or pass, please.”
Calliel
gazed up at him, then produced a pass from the same pocket that he had the
twenty dollar bill.
The
security guard took it and swiped it in his handheld verifier-thingy. He stared
at the thingy's screen for a long time, his eyes growing steadily wider, then
goggled at him in amazement.
"Really?" he said breathlessly, and absentmindedly handed
the card back.
"Really,"
said Calliel, pocketing it. "Tomorrow morning, eight o’ clock, Qualcomm.
Can you make it?"
"Of
course," said the guard, whose face now fairly glowed. "Thank you ...
Thank you so much ..."
"Calliel,"
said Calliel.
"Calliel,"
said the guard, who vacantly walked away. By the time he got to the woman in
the next seat up to verify her ticket stub, his countenance had darkened once
more into stoic indifference, as though his encounter with him hadn't happened.
I
never found out what that guard saw when he swiped Calliel's trolley pass, and
I never got a good look at the card itself. The guard got off at the next stop,
and I never saw him again.
At
H Street
in Chula Vista ,
Calliel got off.
Early
evening had fallen over the city. He gazed up at the leaden sky, then made his
way through the drizzle towards the buses. Ten minutes later he boarded the
903. That was my bus. He extracted a bus stub from his pocket (why not the
magical trolley pass? I wondered. After all, they were valid on the buses as
well) and showed it to the driver, who responded with a blunt snort. Calliel
marched to the back and sat. I was tugged along behind him, and came to a
floating rest beside him.
I
studied him.
He
was a good-looking man (cherub, whatever), late 30s or early 40s, with short
light-brown hair, hazel-green eyes, and a long nose set between high
cheekbones. He had a strong chin and his face was clean-shaven.
He
was tall and fit, broad-shouldered and slim-waisted. I wondered if all angels
were in similar shape, and how they stayed that way. Was there an angel's
fitness club in Heaven, a Gold's Gym-type outfit they all congregated at
(pardon the pun) to keep toned? Or perhaps one of the rewards of getting into
Heaven was a permanently cut physique?
I
hadn't asked him these things, and now regretted it. It seemed a stupid thing
to focus on—his physical traits. I hadn't done it, not once, while I knew him,
in all the times we were (or were about to be) together.
My
life on Earth was very quickly drawing to a close, and was, for all intents and
purposes, over. Shouldn't I be thinking about God, or what lay ahead, what the
future held for me, or if there was going to be a future at all? I was about to die—and yet here I was admiring an angel's
physique!
(And
no, he didn't have wings or a halo.)
I
considered my soon-to-be-crushed physical form. I was no looker, but I wasn't
ugly, either. I was a fairly plain-looking man, five-ten, with slowly graying
and thinning brown hair and sharp blue eyes. I was a little soft in the middle,
admittedly, but nothing you'd call fat. I had walked this Earth with a strong
back and legs, but the choices I'd made the last thirty-plus years of the
sixty-three I'd gotten had worn on me like acid rain, darkening my gaze and
turning the corners of my mouth down. Aside from the odd cold or flu, I hadn’t
been sick a day in my life. But those choices made it look like I was within
walking distance of death's door, even though I never was: a pale countenance,
sloped shoulders, and rigid hips. Students had long since labeled me "Dr.
Death Ray" (my given name is Ray), not only because I had been an
uncompromising hardass, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but also by my
endlessly sullen demeanor, which is always, necessarily, a bad thing.
The
true terminal disease of my life had been my outlook on it, my worldview: a
malignant, grotesque, swelling tumor I displayed proudly for three decades.
I
stared at Calliel, who had closed his eyes.
Was
he praying, or was he merely tired?
He
opened them when the driver pulled away from the curb. He was one of only two
passengers aboard. The other was an old woman sitting halfway up. When the bus
slowed to a stop at a light, he got up and sat across the aisle from her. She
looked his way, and smiled warmly.
"I
knew you'd come back," she said.
He
put his hand on her shoulder. "How are you, Nora?"
"Oh,
fine, just fine," she replied. "Just headin' home. I knew you'd come
back. Always knew it."
"How
long has it been?" he asked.
"Lord,"
she laughed quietly, "seventy years? I was only seventeen; now I'm
eighty-seven. But look at you! It's like no time passed at all! You're just the
same! No surprise there, I suppose ... and no surprise that you're back. I
always knew you'd come back ..."
Her
smile didn't fade as she said, "You're here for me, aren't'cha?"
"There's
nothing to fear," he said, squeezing her shoulder gently.
"I'm
not afraid," she said. "Not anymore, at least. Not about that. Not
since the last time I saw you ..."
"That's
my girl."
He
looked ahead, then back at her. "Your stop is coming up, so I need you to
listen very carefully to me, Nora, all right?"
The
old woman nodded.
"I
want you to keep walking even after you lose your cane, do you understand?
Don't look for it, and no matter what, don't look behind yourself. Okay?"
He
gazed briefly at the silver cane leaning against the empty window seat, then
back at her.
She
nodded. Her smile had vanished, replaced by what I could only call fierce
resolve.
"You
won't need the cane after you lose it, so don't worry about it. Let it go. You
just keep walkin’, Nora. Keep lookin’ ahead and keep walkin’. When you get to
the gates of your apartment complex, go on through. You'll feel real scared at
those gates, and when you get to them you'll know why. But go on through
anyway. Can you do that for me?"
She
stared at him without blinking for a long time, then nodded.
"Will
you be with me, Calliel?"
He
shook his head sadly.
"Will
God?"
"That's
entirely up to you," he said. "Ask for Him, and He'll be there. I
promise." He looked at the cane again, then back at her.
She
caught the glance, gazed at the cane, then got it. Her face, like the trolley
security guard's earlier, lit up.
The
bus slowed, stopped. She got up to leave. The driver lowered the handicapped
landing so she wouldn't have to use the stairs. Calliel stood to help her, and
escorted her off. He opened her umbrella, handed it to her.
She
grabbed his arm, then reached up and kissed his cheek.
"Will
I see you again?" she asked. She seemed utterly without fear.
"Go
through those gates, Nora, and you'll see me again. I believe in you. You’re
very strong."
"Are
you here to help someone else like you helped me all those years ago?"
He
nodded.
That
seemed to reassure her enormously, and she patted his arm and hobbled off.
He
reboarded the bus. The driver waited for the handicapped access ramp to secure
itself, then pulled away from the curb.
Calliel sat in the seat Nora had occupied. She waved at him as the bus accelerated away. He waved back, then closed his eyes again.Chapter Two
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