Falling Idols

As Above, So Below

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid

my angels will take flight as well.”

— Ranier Maria Rilke

In the beginning was the word; in the end, not even that. But words are small things anyway, trivial and puny and weakened by limitations. They are, like flesh and bone, inadequate to hold the full measure of what they struggle to contain. Like blood and lymph, they run when the skins that confine them are pricked.

In a world where word could become flesh, this was not the flaw, Austin knew.

It was the folly.

*

Let me tell you about loss.

Let me tell you about lies.

Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.

Better yet, just let me tell you about pigs and mud. Take a lot less time and it’s the same thing, isn’t it? The mud’s filthy, it’s unsanitary because it’s mixed with shit, gets all over everything, but the pigs wallow in it just the same. End result? Only the happiest swine you ever saw.

I used to have the wallowing part down, at least.

You’d think the rest of it would’ve been easy.

I. Terra Firma

At the most unexpected moments she would think she’d seen him. He came when he had no business at all in her head, Gabrielle on one side of her life and Austin so far on the other it was a wonder she could even remember what he looked like.

But this was something more insidious than fond recollection. These were not memories, spawned by similarities in the faces of strangers, over which she would write his own. His face could not have remained the same, not the way he was living. Where Austin had been headed, these last eleven years would’ve cut and carved and eroded him, remade his once-sublime form into a degenerate parody of itself. No, these were nothing at all like memories — Gabrielle was, however briefly, seeing him as he must look now.

To a point, there was a logical explanation: New York was a dynamic and sinister place; he would be at home here. Austin McCoy would seek its pulse and wade through its chaos. If she thought she’d glimpsed him on Fifth Avenue it was only because he would have business there. If she saw him standing on a platform during a trip out to Long Island it was because trains had always appealed to him. Likewise subways — so why shouldn’t she see him beneath the streets, when the flashing of lights far along those grimy tunnels could strobe his half-shadowed impression anywhere on the other side of the window.

But why now, after eleven years? Whatever the reason, time-delayed pangs played no part in it.

I don’t miss him, Gabrielle told herself. I don’t miss him and I quit worrying about him years ago.

And when he called, how could she ever have told herself that she wasn’t, deep within, expecting it?

The talk was small at first and Austin did most of it, asking how she’d been, telling her that her name looked good up front in the magazine’s masthead.

“What are the offices like, the staff?” he asked. Remarking on the loose layouts, the splashy graphics. “Doesn’t seem like it’d be a very stodgy place to spend the day. Like Apple versus IBM, and you’re all fruit-pickers, right?”

She told him it wasn’t button-down, if that’s what he was driving at, then she heard him laugh.

“Corporate but ashamed, gotcha,” he said.

Gabrielle clenched the phone and lowered her voice to an edgy whisper. “If you had to call, then why didn’t you call me there? Why at home? Why call at all, Austin? Do you want to cause me trouble?”

How nearby was Philippe, anyway? Twenty feet? Twenty-five? The stereo on but not loud. He’d’ve heard the phone, but if she was lucky, nothing she was saying. She could lie afterward.

“You always did have a pretty pedestrian idea of trouble, didn’t you?”

“I’m hanging up now.” Empty threat. They both knew it.

After eleven years Austin’s voice was a dire peculiarity, something familiar made foreign by time. But she got past this quickly enough, that voice and its rasp remembering how to find its way inside her, slipping defenses and caressing memories she didn’t realize had been left so exposed. Austin had a magic and knew it, and eleven years doubled around on itself, the snake gulping down its tail. She had gone nowhere.

“I know you’ve been thinking about me lately,” he said. The rasp had roughened over the years. Like honeyed gravel now. “That’s my fault. It didn’t seem right to ring you up without getting you ready first. I hope I didn’t startle you.”

“You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear.”

“I’m in Utah. Why not book a flight? Technically it’d be work-related, I really think you’re going to want to see this.”

“Oh god, Austin,” she whispered. “What have you done now? Or what do you think you’ve done?”

“Should I send you a picture? Maybe you should close your eyes for this one.”

“Don’t,” she told him. “Just don’t.”

“All right. But it’s not so much what I’ve done as what I’ve found. A hint — would you like that much?”

Two worlds: Philippe in the next room with his day planner for tomorrow and his watered-down excuse for jazz music; Austin in her hand, on the far side of then and now and always. She could hear laughter in the background and knew it had nothing to do with him. From her hesitant silence he divined the go-ahead.

“Think back to when we were kids,” he said. “It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns. Its voice isn’t anything special, either. But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.”

*

Let me tell you about hope, middle child in a family of bastard triplets, trapped between faith and charity.

Hope is the carrot of many colors, dangling from the stick before us, and we terrestrial mules plod diligently along after our goals only occasionally wondering why we’re no closer. A good day is when we look up high enough to still enjoy the sun. A bad day is when we look lower and see how much the carrot has rotted.

Hey. Hey. Let me tell you what magick isn’t. It’s not the conjuring of carrots out of nothing. It’s learning how to bend the stick.

*

That night in bed she made the first move and wasn’t coy about it, seizing Philippe and stuffing him inside her as soon as he was stiff. Gabrielle did most of the work, even when she rolled onto her back and pulled him around on top of her, shaking him by the shoulders and drumming him in the ass with her heels. It was all he could do to keep pace, never once seeming aware of how his body was being used to batter Austin out of her, her past, her thoughts, her cells.

Philippe had been too long in America. A few years closer to France and he would’ve smelled Austin on her breath.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked in the dark, afterward.

“Occasion? We’re down to needing occasions now?”

He began soothing her testiness, smooth palm along her hip beneath the sheets. “I’m only trying to remember the last time I went to work in the morning feeling sore down there.” Warm hand sliding down to cup her pubis. “I missed it and didn’t even know.”

She sighed agreement. That was a good feeling. Wanton.

“That ache right over the bone? I’ll feel it throb and then I’m not even where I really am. I can be looking someone in the face and they don’t have a clue most of me’s right back here.”

It was sweet and carnal and dopey romantic, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d first heard it from another woman, before her. That made it easier to admit the totality of tonight’s failure. Some people you simply couldn’t screw out of your system.

“Like magic,” she murmured.

“Oui.” She felt him nod into her shoulder. “Like magic.”

Philippe slipped off to sleep before she did — why tamper with custom? His breathing grew slow and deep, and soon began to catch in his throat, soft palate zigging when it should’ve been zagging. He began to click with wet glottal snorts.

How quickly feelings could change once the brains were all banged out. Willing to die for him one minute, twenty more later ready to do the killing instead. Nothing messy, nothing sadistic. A soft pillow over the face. His was a face made for just such a murder, with a weak chin and a narrow forehead from which his hair was backing away. It would welcome the pillow, and the pressure.

He touched her thigh in his sleep and it quieted him, then guilt drove her from the bed, the room. She stopped when she found herself standing nude before the living room window, tips of her breasts flattening against the glass. Maybe someone was watching, somewhere on the street or from another apartment; she hoped so.

She raised a hand to her throat, experimenting with its fit, recalling another night’s suffocation. No pillows, just Austin’s hands. He had fingers suited for a pianist or a surgeon. He’d known how hard and how long to squeeze. No anger in it, only the lust for experience. She’d not really wanted him to but hadn’t forbade it either. The way it had amplified the orgasm she’d been on the verge of was terrifying, nearly turning what the French called la petit morte — the little death — from metaphor into reality. She’d enjoyed it so much that she knew she could never experience it again. Knew she could never do it to Austin because regardless of when she lifted her hands from his neck, he’d still believe she could’ve held on two or three seconds longer.

Did you see anything? he’d asked.

Stars, she’d told him.

Gabrielle looked for them now, in the sky. Couldn’t find a single one. In Manhattan night came in name only, the darkness as unnatural as the light that stole away the stars. Empty sky above, empty streets below, the West Sixties.

West. The Hudson River was west of here. So was New Jersey, the Newark airport. And then Utah. Go figure.

Back in the bedroom, Philippe’s fitful breath had graduated to an all-out snore. As she recalled, Austin slept like the dead, but she’d always assumed that was because he envied them what they now knew.

*

Let me tell you about God.

The kabbalists have a fundamental doctrine of belief that God is not a static being, but dynamic becoming. Process, as opposed to personage. I can accept this. It explains why so many prayers seem to come back marked Return to sender.

Sorry — God’s closed for renovation. Please try again next lifetime.

*

She had a window seat and a seatmate zoned on tranquilizers, thus all the privacy she wanted. Forsaking books and magazines in favor of memories and the patterns in the land 39,000 feet below. Farmland gridded in a dozen shades of green, the rich browns of fallow fields. Summer in the heartland. Easy to forget she’d been born somewhere down there between the oceans, enough years in New York by now to be entitled to the disdain of a native of either coast: flyover country, the interior … all state fairs, incest, and militias. A few more hours and she’d be wearing snobbery like a birthmark, outnumbered. People would point and snicker.

She was really doing this. Clearing it with the magazine had been the easy part. Austin had told her to think of it as career-related so that was the tack she’d taken. Gabrielle’s editor-in-chief had heard her out with furrowed brow. The town of Miracle, Utah? Last year’s news. And maybe next month’s, she’d hinted. He signed the travel voucher. Do her good to shake out the carcinogens of the office, get in the trenches again, even if the best she came back with was a profile in mass hysteria and the desperate need to believe.

After a glass or three of wine she could usually laugh at the contradiction of her day life: born-again agnostic masquerading as Religion Editor of Disclose. Oxymoronic, but no more so than the actual magazine — a less self-important monthly counterpart of the news weeklies, covering people, issues, and trends for those who doubted everything they read, but read it anyway if its layout was eye-grabbing enough. Media credibility had taken its hike long ago, so might as well flaunt it. Or as one wag had memoed, When it comes to respectability, we’re just dis close.

And she was really doing this.

Family aside, Austin was the only relic from her past with any guarantee of success at uprooting her, reeling her in from across the country like this. True, he was the only one who could infiltrate her mind and trick her eyes, but it was more than that. In her life, there had always been an Austin McCoy, and perhaps always would be. Pretending otherwise wasn’t going to cut it.

Sweet friends as children, benignly indifferent strangers as adolescents, lovers as young adults, and finally a more malignant indifference for the past decade. Austin had always sought the inherent cycles in things. She wondered if he didn’t regard the last eleven years as the gestation preceding some new rebirth between them. Another rung up the evolution of their weird drama. Friends, lovers — what comes next? Nothing so mundane as exchanged vows, she was sure. He was hardly the marrying kind, and she was already there. Although he might enjoy the idea of making a bigamist of her. Been trying to damn himself for years. Maybe ritual adultery was something he hadn’t tried yet, but in that case he really must be creatively bankrupt by now.

Thirty-nine thousand feet below, the docile green quilt of farmland gave way to less tameable ground. Forested hillsides and snow-capped peaks buckled out of the earth, rising toward the belly of the plane. Stone echoes of ancient cataclysm, continents in collision wreathed in clouds and scoured by winds.

Somewhere on the other side they began their slow descent.

*

Let me tell you about wonder.

The earliest scientists saw the world as comprised of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Ever the symbolists, they weren’t being literal. These four elements were the broadest categories for all that is and all that lies within it, from matter to energy to force to potential.

Binding it all together, they agreed, was the fifth element, the quintessence: spirit. Whatever it is, this is the one that still makes modern physics edgy even though its spokesmen agree that without it, we couldn’t exist. Our molecules would fly apart. Even the bulkiest of us, on a subatomic level, is mostly empty space. Head included.

If spirit is the fifth element, then wonder has to be the sixth, because without it no one would ever have cared about naming the other five.

Wonder comes naturally to a child, and when I was a boy, every day I found some new thing to wonder about: What I was made of. Why grass was green, sky was blue, blood was red. Why my neighbor and best friend Gabrielle had a body different from mine. And finally, one day, why I could not die.

*

She grew more appalled with every mile. Knew Utah was a spartan place, if here and there grand enough to film a western, but really: What had happened to Austin’s mind? Out this far he must be living as poorly as an Indian on a reservation.

The town of Miracle — the area’s last stab at civilization — was behind her. A bizarre place, home to several hundred original residents or diehard newcomers. During its brief fame last year as a New Age mecca it had bloated and bustled with seekers after enlightenment, visions, or cures. Opportunists had been quick to capitalize. Moribund storefronts had been given new life, crystal sellers and self-styled healers and tacky bookshops affixing themselves to visitors’ hopes like ticks on a dog. Now they floundered. The dust was taking over again. On the sidewalks she could see the same faces she might find in any rust belt town whose factory whistle had blown for the last time.

The hokeyness of it, the platitudinous kitsch … it was the last place on earth she’d expect to lure Austin.

But three miles later and here she was — rough miles at that. The road wasn’t even paved. Dips in the hardpan pounded at the rental car’s wheels, while the windshield had begun to collect a powdery film of reddish-brown ochre. Tufts of scrub grew low to the ground, as cheerless and hardy as steel wool.

In the distance it was all barren majesty, as far from everyday life as the dark side of the moon, and equally hospitable. Buttes and mesas and red craggy spires skewered the landscape, graven out of stone and left behind to challenge the vastness of pure sky. She might’ve found it beautiful on a movie screen, where men would shoot each other or die of thirst and collapse beside the bleached horned skulls of lost cattle. Great fun. But in real life it was a terrible place. She’d been a fool to come here. A bigger fool for listening to Austin in the first place. Ever.

Gabrielle rounded a curve, a hill. Saw the shack before she saw him. Naturally — the shack was bigger. But not by much. Two rooms’ worth, hammered together ages ago from rough planks, all color baked out of them by the same sun whose gleam caught the bare metal of the stovepipe for an incandescent moment.

He was sitting on the ground out front, one knee drawn up for him to lean on, other leg extended at an angle. Head down and a curtain of hair over his face: Austin, eleven years wiser, was he, or eleven years more deluded, self-destructed, and confused? In his hand a stick, but wherever he’d picked it up, it wasn’t here; not one tree in sight. If you needed to build a quick coffin you’d first have to dismantle living quarters.

She slowed, wheeling off the road and following the scored tracks left by what she assumed was Austin’s car. She stopped but her dusty wake kept coming, a gritty drift of red, and she stayed put behind the wheel until it passed, obscuring Austin for the moment. Gabrielle soaked up the last of the a/c before turning off the engine and cursed the sun.

The cloud thinned and Austin emerged from its murk. He hadn’t moved but it looked as though his body had refused the dust, or else the dust wanted nothing to do with him. For living in a sty, he looked remarkably clean, only weathered like the wood behind him.

When she left the car he seemed not to notice, staring down at the ground before him instead, where he was using the tip of the stick to draw spirals in the dirt, from center outward with a clockwise twist. He’d draw one and wait, while she remained beside the rental, last link to normality. The air at the center of each spiral would shimmer like heat-haze on a horizon before coalescing into a tiny whirlwind. He would let it spin for a few moments, fattening on its own momentum, then bring down his other arm to snuff out the fledgling cyclone with his palm.

His mind must be gone, she thought. He thinks he can draw tornadoes now. Gabrielle blinked a few times, left her eyes shut, and when she reopened them he’d tired of the game and she was no longer sure it was what she had really seen.

Austin told her he was glad she’d come, nice to see her again after all this time, she was looking good. All the usual smalltalk suspects, except they sounded poised on the brink of mockery. Or was she projecting? She crossed arms and used a shoetip to drag a crude spiral in the dirt, and when nothing else happened kicked it out and nodded at the pathetic shack.

“I’d hoped better for you, Austin, I really had.”

“I know you must find it a Green Acres kind of shock, coming here,” he said. His raspy voice lilted up several notes: “‘Noo Yawk is where I’d rahther stay…’”

“Austin? For future reference? When you act smug, first make sure you have something to be smug about.”

“For instance? A marriage I’m starting to doubt, an apartment in a rent-controlled building, the title of Religions Editor at some magazine more people look at than actually read? Are those what you had in mind?”

“Maybe it’s not much,” she said, clipped now, “but it’s my life.”

Of all the things she didn’t need, it was for him to start looking at her with pity. Pity. Brown eyes going liquid with their wisdom and insight and compassion and lord knows what else, Austin thinking maybe now he looked like a black velvet Jesus.

“I remember a Gabrielle,” he said, “who wanted to spend her life trying to scratch beneath its surface and understand what was really going on underneath.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I did. And you know what I found? Responsibility and bills. I found adulthood.”

“But now,” he went on, as though he’d not heard her, “she just reports on other people’s lives. Or does she even do that much anymore? If she’s an editor, I guess that means she gets to let others do the reporting and she only decides what to print.”

“At least I have a stack of magazines to show for it. What do you have?” Regretting it instantly — her voice had shrilled into a tone from a playground spat.

“Isn’t that what you came all this way to find out? Hee hee.”

“Maybe we should just move along to it now that we’ve gotten the mutual disdain for each other’s compromises out of the way.”

He rose from the ground and brushed the dust from the seat of his pants, ancient khakis that might once have been worn deep in the Amazon or in the shadow of the Sphinx. His tank top was faded into the same indeterminate shade and hung from shoulders whose collarbones were clearly defined. He was bamboo-thin and burned by more suns than she’d cared to see, his hide cured but not quite leathery. It seemed to have constricted over every muscle, every tendon.

Austin’s face had been like an artist’s once, brimming with sensitivity and curiosity. The bones of cheek and jaw were still there, unfatted, but his face now wore its stripes of crease and crinkle. The years hadn’t all been good ones. His hair remained on the darker side of auburn but hung now past his shoulders, with a single streak of silver flowing from just over his right ear. From the same spot on the left, a fat braid, half grown out and starting to mat together.

She wanted to be furious with him. Didn’t he think part of her had ever wanted to have been the mad one, the impractical one, the one who’d refused normal obligations to leave room for finding answers to questions that most people only asked in their dreams? Austin wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to drink nectar.

But she couldn’t be furious, not when she saw how his clothes hung from him when he stood. In his gauntness she sensed the awful solitude of those years since they’d parted. Gabrielle could see him waking up in places that weren’t home and never could be, no romance of adventure to it, only momentum. Maybe he’d made room in his life for the arcane forms of magick, but this had left none for its everyday counterparts. She would’ve bet her life on it: He’d had no one with whom to subdivide a Sunday newspaper. Or sniff the air after a cleansing spring shower. He’d had no one to leave him sweet notes to find on mornings he’d slept late.

She stepped forward, and so did he. The hug was awkward and stiff. When her cheek brushed against his hard bare shoulder its skin was hot, like a tiny sun.

“Don’t send me away from here feeling like the last eleven years of my life were a mistake,” she said. “You could probably do it if you wanted to, but if you did, that’s something I would never forgive you for. Don’t do that to me.”

Austin drawing back, peering at her — nobody just got up one morning and decided he wanted his eyes to look like that. It had to be earned. Had to accrue. She didn’t want him to say anything to make it better. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t be trite. Nothing that wouldn’t be at least half a lie.

For all the years had done to him, and all she imagined he’d done to himself, when he touched her it was easy to forget she was another man’s wife. Austin needed no magick for that.

And when she heard an old, familiar sound in the distance she was grateful for the way out of the moment it provided.

Smiling now. “Do you know how many years it’s been since I’ve heard a train whistle?”

“No.” Turning it back on her then: “Do you?”

She brushed his cheek with the back of her fingers, knowing they must be thinking different versions of the same thing: that this had all begun with a train.

“Besides the almost-nonexistent rent, that was part of the appeal of this place: I could hear that whistle every day,” he said. “The railroad runs past about a mile away. What we’re hearing now, it’s coming through Miracle. There’s an intersection at one end of the town.”

“How long have you been in this awful place?”

“Nine, ten months. Not long after Miracle started living up to its name last year.”

“Kind of short-lived, wasn’t it?”

“That depends on where you look.”

They waited for the train in the dust and heat. She’d begun to sweat, too aware now of her clothing. Her slacks, her jacket, were all wrong. She was nowhere that labels mattered. They watched the train pass in the distance, engines and boxcars, flatcars and tankers. Listened to the steel rhythm of the wheels. In their clatter lived something soothing, that lulled and rocked until it faded away, leaving a stillness as immense as the heat.

Austin gestured toward the shack. “And now I guess I owe you a wonder or two…?”

She realized now that she’d come not out of expectation, but concern, the only person in the world with a chance of convincing him he needed help. Austin was still young, relatively. He could have many years ahead. Productive years. Fulfilling years. Sane years.

His shack had the suggestion of a porch, scarcely a yard in depth. The boards bowed gently under their weight. He pushed open the door; it squealed on hinges free of rust but thirsty for oil. Past the threshold it was as stifling as she’d expected, and as spare. He kept it touchingly tidy, though, with crates for furniture, clothing and books in their places, along with a few items that had traveled with him, and the tools of obsession that he’d begun to collect even before she’d left him. Mattress on the floor in one corner, cast iron wood stove in another. Lantern and candles; intricate patterns smeared onto the walls and even though they were dry they still drew flies. Best not to think about that.

Eccentric and poverty-stricken, but nothing earth-shaking.

Although there was one more door.

“Ready?” he said. She told him she was.

Austin pushed the door open and took her by the hand. She let herself be drawn in after him, another room of bare rude walls and exposed nailheads and mouse droppings and little windows whose square panes had grown cloudy enough to distort their view of the desert beyond. She looked up at the only thing here to see.

At first she thought Austin must’ve hung the body aloft, but ruled this out. She saw no ropes, no wires. Male, she decided, but she was seeing him from the back, curled into a fetal position like a child cowering in a corner. And corner it was, but a corner made by walls and ceiling, not walls and floor.

Floating. He was floating.

She recalled what Austin had told her on the phone, cryptic though he’d been: It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns.

Austin, stooping to retrieve something from the floor along one wall … a cue stick, too ratty for the billiards table.

Its voice isn’t anything special, either.

Austin, stepping around her to thrust the cue stick up like a spear, jabbing the floater in the side. The man — she couldn’t yet bring herself to think of him as anything else — twisted, sprawling on his back across the ceiling, trying to shrink from the assault. His face looked miserable, like a child poked and teased to tears.

But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.

She remembered the things that had been claimed last year about the town of Miracle, or what it had claimed about itself.

“Austin,” she murmured. Unable to shift her eyes from this toppling of reality, man cringing on the ceiling overhead, nothing holding him up there but … but what? Ignorance of gravity?

“There are no such things as angels, Austin. There aren’t.”

“You’re telling me,” he said. Lowering the cue stick, resting its rubberized blunt end on the floor. “There’s only these lying pricks.”

*

Let me tell you about syllogisms.

If, as the more secular among us claim, your only guarantee in life is a measure of pain, and if, as their more pious brethren claim, the only thing in this world you can rely on is God, then what does that tell you about the Almighty’s nature?

Consider the humble fiber of striated muscle. To strengthen it, to build its mass, it must first be worked. Abused to the point of destruction, fibers begin to shred, tearing one from another in an ordeal of burning and exhaustion.

As the body, so the soul.

Let me tell you, then, about God’s work.

Let me tell you about suffering.

Let me tell you about pain.

II. Terra Incognita

As adults they’d argued about it for years, good-natured but insistent and unyielding: Austin swore that Gabrielle had moved in next door the summer he was nine because it was the same year his father had broken his ankle during league softball and the family had done without its annual vacation. Gabrielle claimed it had to have been the following summer, when he was ten and she was nine, because they’d moved a few months after her grandmother had died and left them the money to do it. There was no middle ground to be had here. The argument had eventually been shelved.

They could agree, at least, that it had been a hot summer, humid, but summers in Kentucky always were — all those lakes and rivers. It had been a summer of scabbed knees and the occasional rash. The neighborhood wasn’t so full of kids that he could afford to ignore the one next door, newcomer girl or not, so there’d been no trial period. They’d taken to each other and that was that.

Whichever summer it was, she’d moved in a few years before the town started to grow in earnest, before so much surrounding acreage fell to saws and bulldozers, to be replaced by strip malls and new houses. Austin remembered it as a place of boredom, but a hard ten-minute bicycle ride in any direction could put them into less tamed territory, where there was at least the possibility of adventure.

Gabrielle knew how to swim; would dive into the river from any cliff that he would. She never flinched at scaling the huge-timbered framework of railroad trestles while trains went rumbling directly overhead. She feared no snakes.

But if there was anyplace that defined their partnership, it was the old train tunnel in the hills past the west side of town. It predated the Civil War but hadn’t been used for decades. The tracks had been gone nearly as long, rails and ties removed like stitches out of the rocky channel leading into the tunnel’s mouth, where it plunged through the next half-mile of hillside. No one passing by on the new tracks thirty yards over would have a clue it was even there. The kudzu and vines and trees between were dense enough to screen it from view. The tunnel was all but forgotten by the town, a discovery waiting fresh for each new generation of young local explorers and adult transients seeking shelter along the tracks.

The place invoked an irresistible dread. No degree of familiarity could do away with its delicious threat, less tunnel now than primordial cave exhaling cold earthy breath and housing a thin perpetual layer of mist. No light shone from its other end because years before the center had been walled up to thwart bikers after one had wrecked and died alone in the middle.

Austin and Gabrielle claimed it for their very own that first summer. It was a place for pacts, for secrets too vital to share anywhere less secure. They’d walk in until the last of the daylight faded on their backs, then keep going. Hearts pounding harder than either would admit to, and skin crawling each time it was hit with a chilly splat of water, gravid with minerals and dripping from the roof. They never lit candles until they’d reached the center wall. The flames threw alien shadows across the spray-painted boasts of earlier comers — dead now, must be, eaten by bears and it served them right.

Even today Austin would catch himself opting to recall things differently than they’d really been. Not the what so much as the why. Some kids never want to come home because they don’t have a care in the world; others, just the opposite. He still found it tempting to exchange one for the other.

He always told Gabrielle that the bruises across the backs of his hands were from the kitchen cabinets, shutting before he got clear of the doors. Made him out a klutz but it was a good lie; the door edges would cause long thin marks same as dowel rods. Gabrielle seemed to suspect otherwise after a few weeks but they never went near the truth — his father, an insistent man when it came to memorizing Bible verses. Just one generation out of the hills. Nobody would speak about it but evidently Austin’s grandfather had lived and died a snake-handler.

He saved that revelation for the tunnel, feeling giddiness and guilt on the way out. Walking toward daylight now, the entrance was so far ahead that all they could make out was the color of vegetation beyond. The archway, seen through a quarter-mile of mist, turned it into a luminescent green egg, something from which a dragon might hatch. Draw closer and this illusion fell apart, only to be replaced by a new one. Now they were the hatchlings, about to emerge into a new world.

On the day it all began, they could hear a train, on the tracks running parallel to this forgotten quarter.

“Let’s hop it,” Austin said, because there was still a lot of walking before they got back to where they’d hidden their bikes, and because neither of them had hopped a train before.

They broke into a run, out of the tunnel and up the path back to the tracks, ferns slapping at arms and legs. They paced the train as it chugged along, stumbling over cinders and the squared ends of the ties.

He still had a clear image of Gabrielle, first to reach the ladder clinging at the front of a boxcar. She might have been the taller one that summer, longer limbed, with a gazelle’s grace. Her hand grasped the steel rung and she pulled, and so did the train; she was swept up and off her feet as cleanly as if scooped by a vast hand. Austin poured on the speed when he saw her carried farther ahead, Gabrielle’s face radiant with the thrill, and she shouted something he couldn’t hear over the clashing wheels.

Next boxcar for sure.

It began to roll past him, and he saw another ladder, lunged for it. Closed one hand on the rung, then the other, same as doing a chin-up in gym class. His shoetips skimmed over cinders as he dangled, until his palm hit grease on the way up.

He always thought there’d been a silent scream on Gabrielle’s face as he fell and got yanked toward those steel wheels, never entirely convinced he hadn’t added that detail later.

But really, what else would she have done — laughed?

*

Austin let her leave the shack and scuff outside in the dust awhile. Better she come to terms with this in her own time.

Kids cope better than adults with witnessing the impossible because their valves are still open on what can and cannot be. The impossible may become instead the improbable, the rare. But it had been a long time since they were kids. Long enough for Gabrielle to have rewritten everything as dreams and runaway imagination.

He watched from the window as she found the water pump out back and levered up a bucketful to rinse her face. Most of the makeup came away and that was a good thing. Her breezy coif wilted around her face and that helped too. She was almost looking like someone he actually remembered, fresh, with wide-spaced eyes and a small nose that used to freckle easily.

Austin rejoined her on the narrow excuse for a porch, in the meager shade of its overhang. Came up behind her as she sat on the edge refusing to look at him in the doorway.

“I spent a lot of years telling myself that you weren’t just weird. That you were a lunatic,” she said to the desert.

“I’m not saying you were wrong.”

Gabrielle hung her head, then with a sigh patted the planking beside her. He sat.

“Back inside, he … it … that’s not just some man,” she said, clarifying for herself. “Not a yogi, or fakir, levitating. That’s not what I saw.”

“It’s male. But a man? No.”

“And not an … an angel. You said that yourself. Right?”

“Not as you and I used to think we understood the term.”

She let that digest. “You’re telling me there’s some basis for calling it — him — one anyway?”

“Let’s say you did. You wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”

“Here in this part of Utah, you mean?”

Austin patted her arm. Thinking so small. “Or anywhere else over the last ten thousand years. Maybe more.”

“Well. There’s some perspective.” She lowered her head into her hands and laughed into them. “Once you get past the levitation he didn’t look very … powerful, impressive, omnipotent, I guess those are the words I’m looking for.”

“Hottest part of the day, it tends to make them sluggish. Or this one it does.”

It took her awhile longer, but Austin knew she’d get around to it eventually, and did, piecing her composure back together and asking what she was doing here. Why he’d called. Why bring her all this way. Why she’d agreed to it, even.

That he had a being floating in an oven-hot room and that it looked human but wasn’t, that he claimed its pedigree reached beyond history … all well and good and properly astounding, even if only half true.

But what use was it to her, ultimately? Her jaw might drop today, but tomorrow there would still be bills to pay, an employer to satisfy, family to whom she was still accountable. Were these things now disposable while she moved to the desert and worshipped something in a torpor that allowed itself to be jabbed in the side with a stick?

She still had to get up each morning and contend with the woman in the mirror. None of this was the province of angels, real or faux. Why would they bother to stoop so low?

She interrupted herself: “I’m ranting, aren’t I?”

“Or assimilating.”

Austin had no problem looking at this from her perspective, Gabrielle confronted with a thousand questions to which she might want answers, but not answers she’d have to live with. And he knew now why events had conspired to bring her here: to be taught.

Yet still, he wanted only to kiss the sweat from her brow.

“Remember those last days we were together?” he said. “Do you remember what you called me?”

“A lot of things, probably. I give up.”

“You told me I was more deeply alienated from life than any person you’d ever seen. I thought you were right, too. I gave you plenty of reasons to feel that way, I know. But that wasn’t it, I know now. If it was that bad, I’d’ve killed myself, and that was never an option for me.”

“You were doing a good imitation of it, then.”

“It wasn’t that I was losing interest in life. Just the mask that gets nailed over it and mistaken for the real thing.”

“You’re hardly unique in that. But not many people go to your extremes.”

He could do nothing but shrug, and she had to laugh at the understatement. The genuineness of its sound touched him in the same way that the scents of meadows or bread could summon another time. A lesson that he’d had to relearn: Where there was laughter, there was hope.

“Is there no one else in your life, Austin?” she asked, less cheered now. “I don’t mean angels, or devils, or whatever you’ve chased over the years. Just simple … companionship?”

He looked at the rugged wood of the porch, knowing she’d see whatever she feared most in his hesitation. Companionship — and if there was? Why not just tell her? Because he didn’t want to see that it didn’t matter to her?

“Is it someone in the town?” she asked.

He told her yes, leaving it at that because it seemed to prick at her and maybe he wanted it to. Maybe she’d instinctively know how little there was to it, physicality and not much more, because how much else did he have to give? Gabrielle knew he’d never advocated celibacy as a path to anything. If he told her the woman’s name was Scarlett that would only confirm every suspicion.

“What you said earlier,” he said instead, “about bills and obligations, about these being your life … you missed the point and you know it. Those aren’t your life, they’re just the pictures you hang on your wall. You can live with them. You can change the pictures. You can even knock down the whole wall. That’s always your greatest power, but it’s also the scariest. Haven’t there been days you know you would’ve made different decisions if you’d only known what the consequences were … or weren’t?”

Sure, she told him.

He pointed toward her car and the road.

“Then do you really want to look back on today,” he said, “as another one of those days?”

*

He had awakened to the contrasts of firelight and darkness, remembering the fall from the train and the moment of horrible certainty that he was heading for the wheels … and nothing more.

“No, none of it is a dream,” he was told. “No more than all the rest of it. But by the time you’ve got that one figured out for yourself, I expect you’ll have forgotten I even mentioned it.”

Beneath the blanket he lay on, cool earth. At his feet when he stirred, loose bricks, a century old if they were a day. The pale painted face of the tunnel’s center wall towered overhead, bathed in the shadowdance of a crackling fire whose warmth pushed away the damp chill back here where no summer had ever reached.

Austin sat up and peered down the length of the tunnel. From here, the dim green egg of the entrance looked no bigger than the nail on his little finger.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“You don’t sound very sure about that.”

“But I—” He couldn’t finish, couldn’t say the words.

“I know it’s going to be hard,” he was told from the other side of the fire, “but let me try making this as easy for you to understand as I can. My problem is, I can’t talk to this ten-year-old mind of yours on quite the same level as I can talk to your body and soul.”

These weren’t the sort of words he would expect to hear from the man on the other side of the fire. The man he saw looked dirty and long-bearded, wearing the same rags as the men sometimes seen tramping up and down the railroad tracks. His mother had always told him to steer clear of them, and he had, but she’d never said he couldn’t stare. Everybody knew they stank of wine. Everybody knew they pissed their pants. He’d watched older boys throw rocks at them and it had seemed funny until now.

“You know what your soul is, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Austin said. “It’s inside my body and it’s invisible and it’s what makes me me.”

That earned him a smile. “You’ve their places switched, but that’ll do. That’ll do nicely.” The man reached toward the fire, pulled up from beside it an open can of beans he’d been warming. The label was singed. He stirred them with a spoon. “Your body knows things your mind doesn’t. Like how to heal a scraped knee. You don’t have to think about it, or tell it to work. It just does the job. You follow me so far?”

Austin nodded.

“Let’s keep going, then. Your soul remembers things that even your body doesn’t. Don’t be getting yourself a big swelled head over it, it’s not just you. Everybody’s does. What’s different about you is, your soul’s gotten to the stage that it’s remembered one of the last things it needs to.” He blew on a thick spoonful of beans before shoving them into his mouth. Gravy dribbled down his wiry beard. “It’s remembered how to talk to your body and work with it, and share some of those other things it knows.”

“Things like … what?”

“Today, for instance? How to keep a clumsy boy like you from cutting himself in half.”

Austin started to ask if that meant he’d bounced clear of the tracks, but the man began shaking his head and touched a finger to his lips, mouthing No, no, no. Austin looked harder at his face, now noticing something peculiar about his eyes. They were two different colors — one blue, the other brown.

“Don’t try remembering the moment if you don’t want to. It’s a thing no boy should dwell on if he can help it. Think about this instead: Can you cut air? Can you cut water?”

Austin shook his head no.

“You may feel solid. But you’re not as solid as you think.” The man grinned, firelight glinting off his teeth. “It’s a world of illusion you live in. You may not have always known it but your soul did. Remembered how to spread the word just in time, too, by the looks of it.”

The lessons of hundreds of Sundays began to seep through at last. This man may have looked like a stew bum but that was just a disguise.

“Are you an angel?” Austin whispered.

The man turned one way, then another, looking over either shoulder. He shrugged at Austin. “Do you see any wings?”

“I don’t see no trumpets neither, but that don’t mean you haven’t got one somewhere.”

“Well observed. Then I expect maybe I am.”

“But—” Now he was having some problems. “My momma says angels only sing and make big announcements and test people and save them if they want to, but they don’t come sit around and jaw. Not like this.”

The man laughed and slapped both hands down on his knees. “Nothing against your dear mother but she sounds like a stupid woman to me, one who lets books and other people do her thinking for her instead of making up her own mind about what’s right in front of her. But if that’s her way, then you can’t take it from her, no more than she can set yours for you. You have to realize she’s not nearly as old inside as you are, and that can make a difference. So you’ll just have to be patient with her.”

Austin tried telling the man that he was wrong, that she was almost thirty, kids weren’t older than their mothers, but the man just grinned again as though he had a secret and ate more beans.

“Sir?” Austin said. “Will you answer me a question? Does this mean I can’t ever be hurt or nothing?”

“You can hurt yourself. You can always hurt yourself. I were you, I’d not go jumping in front of any more locomotives just to see what I could get away with. And in a few years when you start shaving, don’t get the idea you need never worry about nicking your chin. It’s all a matter of degree.”

He recalled feeling like Superman at the time, or maybe Superman dreaming of being a boy again.

“I never heard of nobody else being this way. Why me?”

“Well now, there’d be two answers to that. The short one and the long one, but young as your mind is, neither one would do you much good today.” The man shook his shaggy head. “Besides, it’s a thing you should really be figuring out for yourself.”

The man, if a man he was, treated himself to another helping of beans, then sighed and gazed toward the faint greenish glow at the opposite end of the tunnel. Telling Austin that he had to go back outside now, there would be people looking for him and that the kindest thing he could do for them all was turn up alive. For Gabrielle especially, inconsolable Gabrielle who was sure she’d watched him die.

Austin trudged through mist and chill, and the nearer he got to the entrance, the brighter grew daylight’s sheen upon the moist and dripping walls. He looked back only once, and saw a fading glow of embers.

At the entrance he blinked away the glare in his eyes. The world had never looked so clear, so green. But he and Gabrielle said so every time they came out. He walked farther, until he could hear voices calling to each other over on the tracks, and none of them sounded as though they were having a very good day.

It was nothing he would have noticed back in the dark of the tunnel, with other things vying for attention, but out in the daylight he spotted it the first time he looked down: Slashed across the front of his jeans, along the top of both thighs, was a fat stripe of oiled grime, as though he’d draped his empty pantlegs over the rail and waited for the train wheels to grind it in.

Whipping for sure. His mother would never get a stain like that out in the wash.

*

“They’re called the Kyyth,” he told Gabrielle. “If there was ever a language it meant something in, it’s dead and long gone by now. He hasn’t said much about that. He gets evasive about certain things.”

“So what you’ve got back there floating in that room is the same as whatever you said talked to you in the tunnel.”

“Same species, different individual. The big difference is, the one thirty years ago had his shit together, I think. This one, he’s a bit … touched in the head, is how our families might’ve put it.”

“All these years I’d decided that never happened, that you’d dreamed it or had a concussion from the fall,” she said. “So what you have back there sleeping on your ceiling—”

“He has a name, why don’t we use that. Memuneh. Or it’s what he likes to be called now. I get the impression they don’t keep the same names indefinitely.”

“Memuneh, then. Memuneh was responsible for the things that happened in the town last year.”

“Sad, but true.”

“Why sad?”

Austin almost told her but reconsidered. “Maybe you should make up your own mind about that after you talk to him. You might see it differently. You might not think it’s sad after all.”

“You called him a lying prick.”

Austin grinned. “I did, didn’t I? Don’t let it bias you, it wasn’t without affection.”

She was up and off the porch in another moment, going nowhere but in circles, compelled to move all the same. He knew the urge. You couldn’t take these things in and just sit on your ass. You felt you had to do something with the knowledge, right that very moment, and there was nothing to be done but let it settle in and begin reweaving the fabric of the world you thought you knew. Some days he believed that being given hints of a higher design was far crueler than the coldest shoulder an indifferent universe would have to offer.

Gabrielle was barefoot now with her slacks rolled up, and he watched her feet on the warm ground, watched the dust cake between her toes. What a privilege that he’d been able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances — child-size to full-grown, wading in streams and kicking in lakes, running through grass and skipping over hot pavement, and, more languidly, tracing chills of pleasure along his legs, his chest. Her feet. He thought of them in New York, crammed aching into professional shoes, and could scarcely tolerate the thought. Her dear feet.

Congratulations, she was telling him, and he knew she meant it but there was bitterness too. Congratulations, you solved the grand mystery of your life, and was it worth everything you gave up to do it? Worth your blood and scarred skin and the pain you caused others when they realized they could never possess you more than a vision from a head injury? Congratulations, after years of obsessive pursuit you tracked down your angel, and is he all you hoped he would be? Does his conversation answer all the questions that roasted your heart alive? Now you must know things the rest of us can only guess at or dream about, and how pleased with your choices that must make you feel. So congratulations. Was it worth the life with me you traded for it? Was it worth the children we never had?

Suddenly Austin wasn’t sure if she was saying all this, or only part of it and he was filling in the rest with everything she left unsaid but smoldering in her eyes. Or maybe she’d said none of it and this had lain in his heart all along, waiting until the sight of her would make it scream.

He wasn’t even sure she was really here.

It’s a world of illusion you live in.

Was it worth it — and what price Paradise for those who refuse to wait?

My god, he thought, what have I done?

He left the splintery porch, found Gabrielle to be as solid as anything he could hope to believe in. Her jacket was gone now and she wore a sleeveless top, buttery-gold skin of her shoulders so real to the touch, hot with the sun. Stiff and resistant at first but this was good; illusions wouldn’t bother to fight. No illusion would give in so sublimely. And then, such quiet bliss to hold each other again after eleven years of forever.

“I hate you,” she murmured into the side of his neck, her eyes and nose almost as wet as her mouth.

They held each other in the silent heat, before towering watchers of red stone, their bare feet curled firm into kingdoms of dust.

And for now — and only now, he feared — it was enough. It was the world, or at least the best this one had to offer.

*

After that day on the tracks and in the tunnel, he had a harder time finding anyone who believed him than he thought he would. Disturbed kids looking for attention, some said, and making a bad joke of it in the doing. While it had happened before Austin’s time, the town still felt a persistent soreness over three boys even younger, killed on those same tracks.

Believers? Certainly not his parents. The intercession of a divine guardian made no difference. Angels didn’t eat beans from cans. Period. He’d hoped that the preacher at his parents’ church would take his side, but while Reverend Hollis showed no annoyance over suspicions of hoax or the price of a ruined pair of Levi’s, even at that age Austin knew when he was being talked down to.

Believers? Even then there was only Gabrielle.

Over the next few years they looked for angels in the clouds, in the trees, in the tall fields of summer corn. They hunted for them in the black dust of coal piles and in the muddy waters of river, pond, and stream. They watched for them among the stars that flickered or streaked in night skies, and it was here they always felt closest to their quarry, but still too far away.

Year by year they grew taller, grew hair in places they’d never had it before, as the world grew wider to accommodate them, then swallow them altogether. Humanity’s seething mass and the questions it forced about slaughters and plagues and planes that fell from the sky — none of it boded well for the presence of holy messengers.

He was willing to admit defeat — maybe it really had been a dream — but Gabrielle wouldn’t let him. Telling him, “Even if you did fall and hit your head, so what? I know what I saw happen to you and I never fell.”

It was years before he walked the tunnel all the way back to the wall again, and when at last he did, he did it alone because that was the way he was spending much of his time anymore, gawky and bespotted with acne that no prayer seemed able to scrub away, and Gabrielle by now had friends who’d never had ten words for him and never would.

Over the years he’d entered the tunnel often but only so far, as if stayed by some inner hand from violating the sanctity of a chamber whose threshold should not be crossed until he was ready. It had, of course, been checked out by the rescuers he hadn’t needed after his fall from the train. He heard they’d found nothing. The cold ashes of a dead fire — meaningless in an area known for transients. No bedroll, no empty can of beans.

Once a child, now an adolescent, he remembered a declivity in the ground, in one corner where the defaced concrete wall met the wall of rock. Seepage had always filled it before, a wide pool of cold, inky water. He’d chucked his share of rocks into it, taking pains to never get too close. It could be a bottomless well for all they knew. Anything could crawl out of it.

But when he turned his flashlight on it now, it was nothing but a hollow, sharply sloping walls of moist earth with a few inches of stagnant water in the bottom. And a body. It lay on its side, curled like a discarded fetus, little more than bones, rags, scraps of leathery hide, and the scraggly seaweed of a wild beard. Something about it — the scorching of an exposed collarbone splitting through the thin flesh, maybe — seemed seared to him, as if it had charred halfway to mummification, then fell in the pool and sank to the bottom. Preserved by minerals, maybe, and waiting to be found. Time capsule. Message in a water bottle. A cold gust of laughter blown into his face from the past.

There was no rational reason to step into that shallow grave, feel the chilly water flood his sneakers, sluice at his ankles. No rational reason to lay hands on that soggy husk or peel back the shriveled flaps of its eyelids. He did it anyway.

Because there was no rational reason to expect those peculiar eyes to be anything but ooze by now … yet they’d survived to stare from their otherwise ruined sockets, the whites untarnished by rot, the irises unfaded — one brown, the other blue. It occurred to him this time — it would not have before — that these were eyes for two worlds, one turned toward earth, the other toward sky.

Now it seemed they had closed on both.

Certainly they’d closed on him.

*

A few weeks earlier, when during one of his hikes Austin encountered the Kyyth weeping in the desert, he’d first thought it was simply a man. Another hiker, lost or with a turned ankle, frightened of dying of thirst. Or a freight-hopper who’d left the train before it passed by Miracle, then gone the wrong direction.

Then he’d seen its eyes.

“I knew,” he told Gabrielle. “Right then, I knew.”

“David Bowie’s eyes are different colors. Would you have had the same reaction if you’d met him?”

“There was more to it than the eyes, I just don’t know how to convey it in a way that would make sense. There’s no vocabulary for these things, not in English. Maybe in Hindustani. But not here.”

He understood that Gabrielle expected him to be more or less the same man she’d left eleven years ago to his bitterness and dementia. Not necessarily in the worst excesses of the temperament she remembered, but at least in his capabilities and limitations. Yet even here he was not the same man she’d known.

How to explain moments of a knowledge that asserted itself like instinct, something inborn rather than learned? How to explain the growing manipulation of the properties of earth and air and fire and water? How to explain periods of monumental silence, brimming with lucidity? He felt like a tuning fork, set to vibrating but thrown by mistake into a drawerful of flatware.

Hardly the same man, which was for the better. The old Austin might never even have noticed Memuneh at all. It had been such an inauspicious summit. The Austin she remembered — an Austin he no longer even regarded as alive — would only have been disappointed by his initial encounter with the Kyyth. Appalled by its tears, disgusted by its display of weakness. That younger Austin she remembered would’ve expected no less than glare and thunder as the reward for his evocations, and if the being they heralded had no wingspan to unfurl, like a vain peacock, then by god he would send it back until it returned with the proper plumage.

What a wiener he’d been.

So maybe she wasn’t here to be taught after all. Maybe she was here to forgive him for what he must’ve put her through.

“I haven’t even asked you where you’re staying,” he said.

“At the bed-and-breakfast in Miracle.”

“How many days?”

“I left that loose. They accommodated.”

“I can imagine. Not the waiting list there was last year.” He laughed. “It’s like an Old West boom town where they struck angels instead of silver, and then it went bust really quick.”

“It has that feeling. A ghost town in the making.”

“You can stay here if you want. I know it’s not as tastefully appointed. But the offer’s there.”

Her refusal was softened by her smile and the bead of sweat at the tip of her nose. “It’s not even on my tab, Austin, now why would I choose splinters over a mattress?”

“Well, it’s purifying,” he said, and they laughed, then spoke for the next hour or more as the sun fell toward the stone spires and anvils in the west. The worst of the heat began to ebb from the day and he figured Memuneh should rouse soon. The first time he turned, impelled by some benign inner alarm, Austin saw him in the square of the front window, watching them in silence. Studying their conversation, maybe even their bodies.

Memuneh was so androgynous as to be a stereotype. Worse, he was familiar. After encountering him in the desert, Austin had combed through books in one of the silly shops that had sprung up like mushrooms last year and found the face he’d recognized: identical to the harpist in a centuries-old painting entitled Musician Angels.

Inspiration and artist’s muse? Hardly. As Austin understood, the Kyyth were not by nature corporeal, but when opting otherwise, they engineered bodies from the elements around them. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen … their comprehension of molecular biology was intuitive but staggeringly complex. Yet they had a refined sense of aesthetics. So long as they were shaping bodies, undoubtedly they’d make those shapes pleasing to themselves, and they weren’t too proud to mimic. There was no reason to believe they restricted themselves to human form, either, if others suited their purposes or whims. A Kyyth could theoretically incubate itself into a wolf or a Sequoia; into something extinct, or even otherwise nonexistent.

And then there was Memuneh, with idiosyncrasies all his own. As doe-eyed as if he’d stepped fresh from a Renaissance canvas, with flaxen hair center-parted and shoulder-length, swept to either side of a high, pale forehead. He could weep, Austin knew, but apparently hadn’t wanted his flesh to sweat.

When Austin touched Gabrielle’s wrist, she stopped talking and followed his gaze. Saw the face, expressionless in the window, then he heard her breath catch in her throat.

Memuneh faded from the window. After it became apparent that he wasn’t going to step outside, they followed. He’d retreated all the way across the room, by the iron stove.

“It’s only Gabrielle,” Austin said. “I told you about her.”

They watched each other in mutual apprehension, as if each was afraid to be the first to move.

“I find your name very beautiful,” Memuneh said to her. She actually blushed. “You watched me dreaming. In the other room.”

Gabrielle, looking at the floor now, stammering an apology.

“You fly in your dreams too,” Memuneh went on. “When you do, you never feel that it’s a new talent you’ve only just learned, but a very old ability—”

“That I’ve just remembered,” she whispered, and touched her lips with fingertips.

“Exactly. That’s the genuine you. Why have you brought her here, Austin?”

“Good question,” he said.

There was no doubt that Gabrielle believed him now, the one person in the world whose opinion of him over time truly mattered. He was vindicated. But was this all? Two thousands miles for him to say, “I told you so”? It couldn’t be as petty as that, his pride alone, of no benefit to her.

She was recovering her wits easily enough — Austin could see whatever remained of the journalist inside rising to this rare opportunity — but then Memuneh himself hardly discouraged it. What degree of power a Kyyth might wield Austin didn’t know. Memuneh, though, had elected to look as if one punch would floor him.

Despite what he was, and the unearthly androgynous beauty of his form, Memuneh looked entirely unintimidating. Gabrielle was advancing on him and it appeared to make him uncomfortable. She, a convert all over again, old doubts slipping from her like the scales from Saul’s eyes: I shut my heart to what I knew was true, all these years, oh my god the loss of them, tell me, tell me as much as my ears can bear, tell me what’s true and what’s a lie, tell me why there’s so much pain, tell me the thoughts of God. Tell me.

But Memuneh was backing away from her, sliding first along the wall, and then up it, head tucking into his shoulder as his feet left the floor. His arms circled his front, cradling himself as he rose, hair brushing against the ceiling and his legs drawing up, and he stopped. Eyes losing focus, each tracking independently now, like a chameleon’s, whites showing in the center as the mismatched irises rolled to the outside.

He had almost none of the quiet self-surety of the Kyyth from the train tunnel. Memuneh was at times like an autistic child. An angel savant.

His eyes were fibrillating in his head, then his head itself began to tremble. A thread of fragrant fluid, like filtered honey, slipped from the corner of his mouth and to the floor. From deeper in his throat, two notes, one high, the other low, their pitches in wavering flux like the unsure harmonies of wolf pups learning to howl. The sound of it prickled hair and Gabrielle was beside herself for having triggered this.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Austin told her.

From behind them, another sound, the soft rustling of growth. They turned to see green tendrils curling from the symbols he’d marked on the walls, not that he needed them anymore but he felt a nostalgia for the crude gateways they’d once been. From their flaking rust-toned lines surged this unexpected new life. Buds fattened at their ends, then bloomed, a garden of morning glories yawning open, then they too began to sing, in shrill screeching voices that pierced like needles of sound.

Gabrielle had pressed her hands over her ears and Austin was about to follow her lead when the flowers quieted. Memuneh fell silent a moment later, drifting back to the floor and focusing his eyes. He looked at the blooms, already beginning to wilt, wither, fall.

“If you insist on painting your walls,” he said, “there are better mediums than blood. I do not like that.”

“My walls, my blood,” Austin said. “Or most of it.”

Memuneh crushed shut his eyes, as if his heart were breaking. “Oh, Austin. How will you ever reach for the future as long as you keep clinging to the past?”

He said he couldn’t be here right now, that he wished to go off somewhere and wait for the stars. A few moments after he was gone, Austin decided anything would be better than facing the look in Gabrielle’s eyes, so he found a rag, and began to clean up the spatters of honeydew and dead blossoms.

*

He’d lost track of her life long before he dropped out of college, but the year after, she was home for a visit and he was home to bury his father, so she came to see it done. Was there any such innocent beast as coincidence? Or was there a process at work here, hidden and cunning? He didn’t think about this until later, caring now only that he could cherish the woman she’d become, and that his skin was clear again.

But it was more than outgrowing the spotty adolescent he’d been. Austin supposed he’d changed enough to seem a new creature entirely, reborn from their shared chrysalis of summer scabs and wonder. New thoughts, new feelings — maybe he was exotic to her now. As children they’d hunted angels, and he still believed, but now he disdained them.

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well, Rilke had written. A revelation. Court the devils with enough enthusiasm and maybe it would shock the angels from their complacent limbo. Angels were like cats, coming whenever they pleased, and devils like dogs — they eagerly came when called.

Anyone’s twenties are a time of great indestructibility, and the days are fertile, without limit. Austin and Gabrielle moved around a lot because there were so many places to move to. Odd jobs when they needed money, slack time when they didn’t. The occasional marijuana transport could keep them flush for months.

Three times, in three different cities, his heart stopped as he overdosed on one drug or another, and after he was resuscitated he would try to remember if he’d seen the tunnel of light that everyone always mentioned. Or his old pal from that other tunnel, the train tunnel, shaking his head with a disapproving sigh and saying, “What did I tell you? Don’t be pushing your luck.”

But no. He got none of this, only a nagging sense of dèjá vu, I’ve done this before, died many many times before, how could I have forgotten all those others…? And then he would wake to the world and Gabrielle’s reddened eyes, and promise her never again.

He couldn’t imagine another woman willing to look inside him for whatever it was that kept her with him. Gabrielle seemed the one pure thing in a wretched world, but maybe that was because she didn’t see the world the same way. If it was true that souls had ages, then hers was one of the young ones; it frisked about like a kitten, driven by curiosity and delight. But his was a weary old tom, waiting out the days in its place in the sun while nursing a disgruntled hunch that something better had passed it by.

People couldn’t live this way forever.

For the past eleven years he’d tried to see it through her eyes instead of his own. Twilight in the Badlands of South Dakota — he’d wanted to go there ever since reading Steinbeck’s impression of that harsh and arid place, knowing by now how artists could be prophets without realizing it, truths they’d never consciously intended seeping into their brush strokes or their words.

They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child, Steinbeck had written of the Badlands. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding. A sense comes from it that it does not like or welcome humans.

But the Badlands didn’t drive Austin away, and that was welcome enough. He and Gabrielle rented a cabin on their border and did what they always did whenever they put civilization behind them: divided their attentions between earth and sky.

He’d been gone a full day when she came looking for him on one of the trails they’d explored together. In the years to follow Austin imagined what it must’ve been like for her, picking her way along the runnels of erosion.

She spotted him on the wide, flat top of a rocky outcropping, kneeling and stripped to the waist. He imagined how he must’ve looked to her as she drew nearer and saw first the braided rawhide whip doubled together in his fist, then the mass of bleeding welts draped over each bare shoulder, all the way down his back to his waist.

He imagined her revulsion on seeing the coyote, the condition of its tawny pelt. Surely she understood that it was dead.

A storm had threatened earlier. The evening sky was a dense blue-gray, sawn at by jagged ridges of stone. The wind blew from the northwest and sliced itself apart to get to them.

“They’re coming,” he told her. “You can’t believe how hard they’re trying to get through here.”

And if she understood that the coyote was dead already, he could imagine her grasping for some rational explanation why it would still be moving, but just its throat and lower jaw, like the victim of a stroke trying to form sensible words. All through that night, he never could make out what they were.

But he could imagine how Gabrielle must’ve felt, turning her back on the sight and running for the cabin. He found it empty the next morning, and the van was gone. She’d left a note, at least.

That he didn’t blame her, he regarded as a sign of growth.

Did you ever consider, she’d written in the note, that you’ve taken what was a beautiful, inexplicable experience you had as a boy and used it to destroy your life?

Only every day, he told the note.

Only every day.

*

She went back to town after Memuneh’s seizure — he didn’t know what else to call it — and did not return all that next day. Or the day after that. The Kyyth was gone as well, but his disappearances were common enough, and never lengthy.

Her headlights woke him late the next night but he pretended they hadn’t as she eased open the shack door and crossed to where he lay on the mattress on the floor. On his side, Austin feigned sleep the way most people never thought to, breathing slowly and deeply instead of falling deathly silent. She bought it. He could feel her go to her knees on the mattress, then slowly draw the sheet down to his waist and leave it there. She was looking at his back in the moonlight, at its mat of old scars. He thought she might’ve touched one, very lightly, but the feeling there was nearly gone.

Soon she retreated but never left, and maybe he’d slept for a moment, because when he began to wonder if she was still watching him in the dark, and turned over to peek through slitted eyes, he saw that Memuneh had come back without his even realizing it.

Near the door, Gabrielle was sitting with both legs tucked beneath her, sagging back against Memuneh. He held her from behind as a parent might hold a child stricken with sorrows, arms wrapped protectively around her, rocking her so gently she might’ve been made of crystal. Now and again his arm would rise, and his fingers dab beneath her eyes.

They were both at such peace Austin dared not move. For all the mystery of his origins, Memuneh seemed a simple creature. He aspired only to be a comforter, as if unsure of what he was, and in lieu of that certainty had looked to paintings for the gentlest reflections of how his kind was seen by those who professed to need them most. He was the creation of dead men and pigments.

Gabrielle was still there in the morning when Austin awoke for good, but not the Kyyth — granting them privacy, maybe. He saw that she was looking through his journals. That he didn’t mind and that she didn’t look sheepish when he spotted her … there could be no greater evidence than this to their having reached back toward their old familiarity.

“‘Let me tell you about loss,’” she read aloud. “‘Let me tell you about lies. Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.’” She closed the notebook. “Feeling a little maudlin that day, were we?”

“Or that year,” he said.

“Did you write that about anybody I know?” She set the journal aside. “Had your heart torn out by women and angels. Just think of the songs you could write.”

He decided to say nothing of the previous night, simply see where the day led. After he slipped on his pants she followed him outside, and he used the tiny outhouse and washed from the bucket at the pump, then shaved. She combed out the snarls in his braid and rewove it, and ran her fingers through the streak of silver on the other side.

“What brought you out of it?” she asked. “Your maudlin era.”

“Evolution?” he guessed. “I just got sick of the sound of my own gloom. I was so full of shit. I really missed laughter. So I started by laughing at myself. You can’t imagine how liberating that was.”

“I’d like to try,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard.

She levered water from the pump and let it cascade over her bare feet. She was wearing a dress, full and flimsy and very free about her hips and ankles, and as the day advanced the heat didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as it had before.

She was still there at dusk, so they watched the evening redness in the west while eating the eggs and beans he cooked over an open fire. The night was clean and cool and cloudless, perfect for stargazing. They spread two layers of blankets on the shack’s roof — ground level was risky; sidewinders might be drawn to their body heat. They lay on their backs, side by side, above them the light and dust of the galaxy, one of billions. For an hour she said nothing, and he wondered how long it had been since she’d seen this panorama, the man-made luster of New York stealing it from her sky.

“Do you remember when we used to do this before, and what we used to say the stars were?” she said. “Sure you do, you remember everything.”

“I remember,” he said. “Your idea, though, wasn’t it?”

“We were probably stoned.”

A decade and a half or more ago they’d decided that stars were the souls of the dead, still shining, and the souls of the yet-to-be, waiting for their descent. Or maybe one and the same, souls in respite before their return, that next chance to get it right, or at least better than the lifetime before. It was utter bongwater, but explained Hell, trapped in a nuclear ball of gas and fusion that burned away all the taints unfit to live behind a baby’s smile.

She told him that Memuneh had promised to share with her the same things he’d already shared with Austin. She asked if there was anyplace in particular that Memuneh went when he wasn’t staying at the shack. Austin just grinned and said, well, maybe he’d share that with her too, while he was being so forthcoming.

“He has a thing for the desert,” Austin said. “He says it reminds him of what’s left of the home of the first civilization, when they first met us.”

“Which — Egypt? Sumer?”

“Earlier than either one, according to him. A lot earlier.”

Later they listened to a train as it roared through and out of Miracle, whistle piercing the night, then saw the distant spear of its headlamp as it raced across the darkened land. And since he’d never lived where wolves were known to roam, this was how he imagined their howls to sound in the wild, purposeful and forlorn and sharp with wanderlust.

Maybe Gabrielle felt it too, because soon she asked what was next for him. Where would he go from here, once he’d gleaned all he could from this rare and wondrous encounter? Would it always be shacks and subsistence, for the rest of his life? Was there no part of him left that wouldn’t be let down by what an average day had to offer? Or did something yet remain that would be satisfied by what he could hold in his hands and heart?

Valid questions, all.

“You said you have a woman here?” she said, voice flat now.

“Yes.” Then, “She’s no one I could grow old with. It’s not that type of relationship.”

“What’s her name?”

“Scarlett.” He waited for snide comments, but they never came.

“You’re already old, Austin. We’ve always known that.”

She said nothing more about Scarlett, and throughout the day, as during her arrival, had said nothing at all about her husband back in New York. He found this more revealing than any truth she might’ve shared or lie she might’ve attempted.

And now it was clear as the night sky why she’d come. It was not to be taught, nor to forgive, although that was part of it. It was, instead, to usher him back to the rest of his life, far from these fields of ephemera. I’ve seen the nearest shore of Heaven, so burn out my eyes, because it could never be Paradise without her … and even with eternity in the balance I still don’t know if I can bear her absence one more day.

In eleven years he could not remember a single sunrise when some part of him hadn’t ached for missing her.

When he reached for her hand she didn’t pull it away, and he found that if he focused on the stars he could forget about the blankets and roof beneath them, and it was almost like flying.

*

Despite claims by the town’s latter-day immigrants and all the revisionist New Age apocrypha written up in cheaply-printed booklets and sold from wire racks beside cash registers, the long-term residents knew better and laughed: Miracle, Utah, had never been named for some earlier imprimatur of divine favor. It had been called Miracle to honor a mule of the same name owned by the first family to settle the area in the early 1880s. The mule had pulled a wagonload of their earthly possessions across the Great Plains, over the Rockies, and into the parched Utah desert, where the family — all fourteen of them, minus the three lost along the way — opted to make their home within the paltry oasis of fertility they found there. Mostly dead anyway, the mule was shot through the head and eaten.

The settlement drew others and, like most towns sprinkled throughout the expanding annex of the nation, went through times of boom and bust. Within a decade after the bones of that heroic mule had been gnawed clean out of nutritional desperation, rich deposits of copper were discovered nearby, then mined for nearly two generations until the shafts wheezed nothing but rocks and dust. By then there was too much town to dry up and blow away, but not enough to roll ahead on its own momentum. There was just enough to stagger in circles without falling.

Why, then, after more than a century since its humble and sacrificial beginnings did it suddenly appear graced by a divine presence? Theories abounded, but one of the simplest held that the name itself had done it, that Heaven had looked down and read the sign on the way in, and decided that alone merited its attention, like a declaration of faith that had never been abandoned.

Mule shit, said the crustier and more pragmatic of the old timers. It was enough to make the town’s namesake turn over in its shallow grave … if the beast even had one.

Still, there was no denying the obvious: Something had come to Miracle. It was first seen floating just above the roofline in front of the town’s tallest building, the three-floor brick hotel. It was seen, on occasion, to emit such a dazzling light that the naked eye had to turn away. On a day of murderous heat, when the electricity went out, a dark and swollen cloud came in from across the distant mountains, in direct opposition to that day’s winds, and cooled the air and streets with a torrent of rain.

Its interaction in the lives of individuals soon followed: a broken leg healed after a drunken tumble down a flight of stairs, a cancer burned painlessly from the jaw of a tobacco chewer. A woman who’d hours before learned that her son had been killed in an accident during army basic training claimed that it appeared in her home and held her through the night while she cried. His eyes, she said, were the most striking eyes she’d ever seen — one blue, the other brown.

By the time Austin read this — incredulously reported in a month-old issue of Disclose magazine that had reached him in Alaska — the world was already beating a path to Miracle’s door.

*

Like most days when he’d made this walk, Austin covered the distance more quickly than he knew was humanly possible. Not far from the shack his head would begin to spin — not with the dizzy side-to-side vortex of drunkenness or illness, but one that seemed to wheel from back to front. He never felt as if he were losing his balance, just his sense of solid ground beneath him. It was not unpleasant, and he’d walk a bit farther along the desert road and find himself in Miracle as fast as if he’d driven.

On foot yet four miles in as many minutes? It was profoundly disorienting at first. But now he just accepted, and laughed. And today headed for the hotel.

With a hesitancy to discuss her past even greater than his own, Scarlett had come to Miracle last year within a week after he had. She’d given different last names on different occasions, and there was no reason to believe any were valid, just as there was no reason to believe that Scarlett was her given Christian name. He’d made these near-anonymous acquaintances before, men and women brushed into peculiar corners by circumstances of lives that had slipped their control, or those who’d remade themselves from scratch and hid from whatever they wanted to leave behind.

It was morning, with Memuneh and Gabrielle off on their own, as he’d promised her. Austin supposed he was taking advantage of it to come say goodbye. Neither he nor Scarlett had ever said how long they planned on staying, but it went unspoken that Miracle was no permanent destination.

“Well look at you, all red-faced and serious-looking,” she said when she opened the door to her room. “You run all this way just to see me, or are you meeting your friend for cornflakes and thought you’d drop by for a quick bounce?”

“You know about Gabrielle already?”

“This town doesn’t bustle so much these days that a new face doesn’t stand out when it stays more than one afternoon. People talk. She’s at the bed-and-breakfast, right? They know where she’s from, Austin, and I’ve got me a good memory. Oh, and come to think of it? I might’ve heard she wasn’t there for breakfast this morning, imagine that. Now where ever can she be, I wonder?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s what I get for trying to keep a secret in a townful of born-again telepaths.”

She reached out and drew him in by the buttons of his sun-faded denim shirt and began to undo them. “I’ve always found that to be one of your more endearing qualities, that you’ll laugh at your own kind.”

But they weren’t his kind any more than they were hers, and everyone around knew it. He and Scarlett may have come to Miracle in last year’s flood of seekers, but there the similarities ended. They were both outcasts in that sense, suspect and heretical.

As a mecca, Miracle was just as crippled now as it had been as a played-out mining town, and this had nothing to do with Memuneh’s abrupt vanishing from public view. The town drew children in adult bodies, and while he didn’t fault them for the sillier beliefs and practices they clung to — children were like that — they showed up wanting to bathe in the glow of angels without ever having shaken hands with devils. Desperate for lives that meant something more than sweat and a grave, they craved the light without wanting to know about the darkness. The wiser among them would eventually learn that the two were indivisible. One couldn’t be had without the other. The rest would always live in fear.

Scarlett seemed the only other one who knew this. She shunned the tarot readers, the crystal merchants, the aroma therapists. She laughed at the wishful thinkers who looked to the desert and swore the buttes were shaped like pyramids. She mocked the fools who waited for a spacecraft to land and pick them up.

Then why was she here?

“You ever hear about the man, thought he was losing his mind, so he checked into the asylum to compare?” she’d told him, her only nod toward an explanation.

“I thought he never left,” Austin had said.

“That was only because he didn’t have anyone else to talk to on his own level.”

And yet. He’d had more serious discussions with the cook at the diner than with Scarlett. It was as if she’d gravitated toward him precisely because she sensed that he wouldn’t go prattling on about auras.

As she pulled him toward the bed he thought of Gabrielle on her hike this morning with Memuneh, and it felt like a betrayal. Not just of Gabrielle and the resurrection of old feelings, but of Scarlett too. He’d never even told her about finding the Kyyth, much less introduced them. She’d seemed so complete without it, the time to do so never right.

She was one of those rare women who became less vulnerable the less she wore, as comfortable in her skin as a panther. There was something about her that he found, not godless, but resolutely pagan. In her physicality she was unapologetic and unshameable. In their coupling Austin felt he came closer to death than he ever had with trains or accidental overdoses.

While she liked to be mounted from behind, bracing herself on hands and knees, there was nothing submissive about it, as she rammed fiercely back with haunches strong as a mare’s. The rising and falling arch of her spine was muscled and, like the rest of her, brown as a pecan. If she scissored him between her thighs he was as good as clenched by a python. Scarlett would toss her head, that shimmering fall of straight hair, crow-black with a reddish sheen, and look back at him over her shoulder as he held on, and her grin was the most lascivious thing he’d ever seen, as if she knew exactly the effect she was having on him.

But that was hardly likely.

This one stubborn concession to an animal urge became the gateway to the most universal trait shared by everything alive: It was like dying. They made savage love and he died, over and over and over and over.

His loins took care of themselves, lunging after rapture, but synapses fired in his head without regard for logic. Like frames from movies seen only while passing through a room, or the frustrating sips of otherwise forgotten dreams.

They took him over again, as soon as he’d gotten to the state where he couldn’t have dwelled upon Gabrielle and Memuneh if he’d tried. Eros and thanatos saturated every breath. He floundered in a chilly bog while a bronze blade slashed his throat. A steel axe caught the sun before splitting his helmet on a battlefield of baked clay. He was shot in an alley, he sighed final breaths upon soft beds and wheezed in agony with fluid-choked lungs and felt the spark leave him as he stared at cow dung inches from his eyes. He felt the claws of a leopard crack open the bony little cage of his chest.

There was no end of ways to die, and when he meshed with Scarlett he was privy to them all.

Had they been his own demises? Other lives, other times? He didn’t know. The forty years of this one seemed enough, that he’d lived different lifetimes in just a few years, through cycles of madness and despair and hope and hatred and love and joy, each one consuming him yet always leaving a capacious hunger for more.

As always, he knew death, and together he and Scarlett found their release, then he slumped across the moist sheen of her back and felt the reaffirming thud of his heart. She shrugged him off her and they rolled over on sweaty sheets. She drew her legs up, crossed them at the knee and dangled five toes over his belly.

“This was it, wasn’t it, Austin?” she said. “I can feel it. This had ‘finale’ written all over it.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Were you planning on telling me? Or just assuming I’d figure it out on my own?”

He had to chuckle. “I didn’t know you ever waited to be told anything.”

“Well now you have a point.” The toes came down, lightly squashing his wet genitals. “You’re going away with her?”

“It’s why she’s here. Neither of us knew it at first, but it’s why she came.”

“Sure about that, are you? What’s so special about her? A nomad like you, you must’ve had lots of basis for comparison.”

“Gabrielle … believed in me. At a time when no one else did. She believed.”

“I guess that’d explain why she left you all those years ago. Yeah. Anyway. What’s it matter who believed you and who didn’t, as long as you knew what was true about you?”

“Sometimes,” he said, “you just need that mirror for your own sanity. You know — like the man who went to the asylum?”

Scarlett looked out the window. “I hate it when they use my own damn words on me.”

“There aren’t going to be any grudges here, are there?”

She turned onto her side and her elbow. “I’m not possessive, Austin. I’m very disappointed in you. In what you’re settling for now. But I’m not possessive.”

“And fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow’s another day, right?”

“Wait and see,” she said. “It might even be more than that.”

III. Terra Infernal

Their hike had started not long after sunrise, leisurely and even meandering at times, but always guided by a sense of destination. Memuneh would stop and show her a particular bush or rock formation as if it had some special significance to him, but wouldn’t always explain why, and when he did, the explanations as often as not left her baffled.

“Don’t move any closer to that rock. A nest of diamondback rattlesnakes lives beneath it,” he told her. “I spent a day here once letting them bite me.”

She’d come to Utah with proper clothes for this — loose shorts and a white cotton blouse and a hat wide enough to shade her face — but had had to use her MasterCard to buy hiking shoes. A worthy investment. With them on her feet and Austin’s canteens slung on her hip, she’d lost her terror of the desert now that it would have to work so much harder to kill her. Drink her water, watch her step, and all was well. As for the heat, summers in New York could be as bad, with humidity, concrete, and kamikaze taxis to tip the balance. She could even claim witness to the imperious beauty that Austin found here.

A friend she’d lost track of had once spent a year in Africa and come back singing the praises of ripping herself loose of all that was familiar. New languages, new cultures, new faces — almost everything she knew had been invalidated. It had been, her friend said, the most terrifying and exhilarating time of her life.

Gabrielle now thought she could understand what this must’ve been like, the past few days taking her to a place that a shift in geography alone could never have accomplished. It had been the rediscovery of a world she’d seen long ago but rejected, in her youth too intimidated by its strangeness to acknowledge it, too threatened by its darker corners to let them touch her.

It was no place to live every day — even Austin seemed to know that now — but it could shape the ways those days were spent.

And now, as she moved in the shadows of vast rocks, she felt a manic joy, no longer afraid to walk away from the life she thought she’d wanted.

Memuneh pointed to a hummock of red stone curving out of the earth. “Here. Look. Here. This is where I encountered Austin. I was sitting, he was walking.”

“He told me you were crying.”

Memuneh didn’t affirm it, but neither did he deny.

“Why?”

“Because I was able,” he said, and seemed to edge away from the matter. She decided not to press it. Had done so once already and the resulting seizure was nothing she wanted to repeat.

“Why’d you talk to Austin at all?” she asked instead. “If what he says is true, you hadn’t shown yourself in Miracle for a couple of months or more. To anyone. Why him, then?”

“I had watched him already, from a distance. I knew who and what he was. I watched him play with the whirlwinds. When he saw me that day he looked at me with such recognition that I saw from his eyes that he already knew the Kyyth, even if our name was unknown to him. He saw me, and knew, and his knees didn’t bend. I had no reason to hide, because there was nothing in him like the others.”

“You were hiding from the whole town?”

“They were not what I thought they were,” he said, “and when the new ones came they were not what I hoped they would be.”

He seemed bewildered by this, like a child in a new school struggling to make sense of why he wasn’t accepted for himself. And Memuneh was a child, in some odd, handicapped fashion. “Touched in the head,” Austin had described him, and it was cruelly apt.

At first this was hardly reassuring, that even the agents of whatever lay beyond the narrow spectrum of everyday didn’t have all the answers. But now she was reconsidering. In a peculiar way, Memuneh offered hope, if not in the manner he probably intended. Because if there was room for mistakes — and in his failure and simplicity he seemed to be just that — then there was always room for atonement, and death would not be the harsh judge she’d grown up being told it was.

He led her onward, and they stopped awhile to watch a hawk on the wing, a dark scythe against the blue, riding air currents in slow, lazy spirals. The sun was high overhead when they reached a gulley between a pair of facing cliffs, and she followed him into it. A half-mile later he pointed out a spot along the wall where some ancient river had carved out a slice from the base to leave a smooth hollow, fifteen feet high and sheltered from wind, sun, and rain by a sloping overhang.

Yes. Oh yes. Here was where Memuneh came when Austin didn’t see him for days.

It was an art gallery, petroglyphs faded by the ages but indelibly left upon the rock in red and white and black and brown ochres. The oldest, he told her, predated the birth of Christ by six thousand years. Some were contemporaneous with that; others a mere eight centuries years old.

How haunting they were: animal totems and the undulating lines of giant snakes, spirals and spoked circles and stars, hand prints and faces with gaping fanged mouths, skinny hunters with their spears. But most mysterious were the bulkier figures more than human, with huge staring eyes, or great racks of antlers or curving horns, or simply rendered dark and solid in their broad-shouldered inscrutability.

They demanded silence and slow breaths, and she was glad to offer it to them.

“The people in Miracle are no longer even aware this is here,” Memuneh said. “Austin knows, but would never tell them.”

She nodded. It was just as well.

“I only wanted to bring them light,” he said, “and hold those who needed it when it was dark for them. I believed that I brought enough light for all of them, but there were so many who wanted to possess it. Light. How can light be possessed?”

He told her then that he’d watched them kill over it. Not publicly, but in secret, at night. He admitted that there had to have been more behind it than what he witnessed, but four of those who already lived here had driven three new arrivals into the desert, far past the other side of town. Graves had already been dug, and to keep the murders from being given away by the sound of distant gunfire, they were committed with a shovel and a pick-axe. “‘It’s our angel,’” Memuneh told her one of them had said, “‘not yours.’” He’d not shown himself in Miracle since that night.

She felt sickened. “You … you couldn’t stop it?”

“Stop it?”

“Just the sight of you would’ve done it — don’t you think? God!”

Memuneh stared, tender face suddenly alien to her, seemingly amazed that she could even suggest such a thing.

“It was only their bodies dying. They did not. Bodies always die. Why would I stop something so natural? I comfort suffering and remove it if I can, but death? There is no stopping that. Death is its own law.”

Then why, she demanded, had he let the murders drive him into seclusion? Why abandon the rest and douse that precious light he’d been so eager to bring? Why sit on his ass in the desert and wait for Austin to come along and finding him crying over it?

Because their eyes were all so weak, he explained, they could hardly see a thing. Even in his presence, he’d realized, they saw nothing but the few years of their own tiny lives.

“And that was a surprise to you?” Gabrielle said.

“Why I might come here? They thought it was for them alone.” He pointed to the petroglyphs, three of the more ghostly figures, the highest off the ground at a dozen feet and among the oldest, he’d said. They were like none of the others, the three bodies long and bladelike, tapering to points. Each dangled one arm at its side and held the other straight out, trailing something the neolithic artist had depicted as thin streamers; from the same arm an arc swept up and overhead and down the other side, like a corona or a single vast wing.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “The one on the left was me.”

Soon, on the return hike, he did most of the talking.

*

“There are no angels and no devils, not as you believe in them … those of you who believe at all. There are only the Kyyth, and how you see us.

“We shared your birth as a separate species and have walked alongside you ever since, only rarely making ourselves known for what we actually are. Some of us choose to play to your expectations. Some choose to confound them.

“But it is for you that we exist, and for no other reason. We exist so that you become what you were meant to be.

“We began as thoughts in the mind of what you have named God, and Allah, and Brahma, and Ialdabaoth, and Ahura Mazda, and all the other names. We fell from that mind into independence so we could remain here. Because then we were all that was left of what some of you much later named Deus Absconditus — the God Who Went Away…”

*

Late that afternoon he sensed Gabrielle returning before she came into view, and waited for her out behind the shack. She was alone, Memuneh having accompanied her only so far, then turning around again.

She stuck her head beneath the faucet and he levered up a cooling gusher over her neck and scalp. As she stood dripping, the water soaking into already sweaty clothes, she’d look at him and smile, look away and frown, look at her feet and shake her head. A day alone with Memuneh could do that to anyone.

“The thing is,” she said, “I’m not sure that I even believe everything he told me.”

Austin swept sodden hair from her eyes. “I think some things he just makes up … to fit the way he wishes they were.”

“But he believes them, doesn’t he?”

“Oh yeah.”

“So if he acts on them like they are, then doesn’t that make them true? Just a little bit?”

“If you remain inside his tiny sphere, then maybe it does.”

She told him how they’d stopped to watch a hawk, twice — once on the way to the petroglyphs, again on the way back. Maybe it wasn’t the same hawk but that was hardly what mattered. Memuneh’s fascination with its gliding upon the air currents was at least as compelling as the bird itself, she said, and finally she’d watched him instead. His absorption whenever it flapped its wings.

“Even a cat eyeing something it’s about to pounce on doesn’t bring the same degree of focus as he brought to that hawk. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be that enthralled by watching something just go about its business,” she said. “Why did he share these things with me, Austin? I’m not anybody.”

“To me you are. And he draws a distinction between me and the rest of the town. He knew I wanted you to see him. Agreed to it.”

“And now we leave him behind,” she said. “I wish we could do something for him.”

You let him hold you the other night, Austin thought. I imagine he considers that payment enough.

But later, after they’d opened a jar of tamales and were heating them with rice over the fire, Austin began to wonder if the two of them hadn’t, in some benign but significant way, been used. Not to exaggerate his own importance, but Memuneh had nevertheless come to rely on him for companionship, and surely understood that this squalid shack wouldn’t be home forever.

Along comes Gabrielle, then, catalyst of that deliverance. As she was always meant to be. Memuneh might’ve even known it first … and so used her as a test before revealing himself to Miracle all over again. Letting her prove to him that not everyone here was the worst example of the human species.

A day alone with Gabrielle could do that to anyone.

Would Memuneh try again? Even now, somewhere in that glowing red horizon, was he hoping, planning, dreaming?

Austin thought it was one of the worst ideas he’d ever heard. Like Saint Francis when no one would listen, Memuneh belonged with the animals. They were so much less likely to disappoint him.

In the distance they could hear the coming of another train, and smiled at each other for everything the sound brought with it.

“Stars’ll be out soon,” he said.

“Maybe you should watch them by yourself tonight. I think,” she said, “I need to stay at the B-and-B. I have things in my head I need to get sorted out. I need to call Philippe. And if you have any … entanglements … you need to wrap up, maybe you should.”

Scarlett, she’d be thinking of. Wondering what the woman looked like. He didn’t tell her that this severance had already been taken care of, just told her she was right.

“Then tomorrow? We start fresh.” She reached out to touch his braid, the silver streak in his hair, the marks that his life had cut into his face. “I love you, Austin. I always have. But I never knew if that was enough. And I still don’t.”

He understood. So as the sun began to set on his last day in the desert he tried to soak in every diminishing ray. Let him hold them inside and let their fire burn there tonight so that tomorrow he could leave some ashen bit of himself smoldering on the ground, satisfied at last that it had the answers that mattered most.

*

“One of your philosophers — French, like the man you took for your husband — wrote ‘Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person’s heart.’

“If even the simplest man or woman is such a mass of contradictions, how much more so, then, is what you named God, simultaneously everything and its own opposite. God is life, God is death. God is growth, God is destruction. God is here, God is nowhere, always … and never.

“Deus Absconditus … the loving God Who Went Away.

“And so the Kyyth filled the void between, each of those contradictory thoughts, splintered off from the rest and contained within itself, with a mind of its own. So that we might come to you.

“It’s what our name means in the language of the first people we showed ourselves to, people the world no longer knows of. In their tongue ‘kyyth’ meant ‘bridge.’

“I would never tell this to Austin because there was so much he instinctively understood already, I felt it would benefit him to keep wondering about something.

“But I tell it to you, because I know he’ll be leaving soon and now I want him to know…”

*

The window of Gabrielle’s room faced east, and even through the blinds the light was bright enough to wake her. Sun and clock alike mocked her and the night she’d wasted.

She hated waking up fully clothed atop a made bed — the sleep never really seemed to count then. She hadn’t meant to drop off this way because she hadn’t meant to go to bed before calling Philippe. Which she hadn’t done because it was so much easier to worry about what she could take back to the magazine to possibly justify the trip here. “Interview With the Angel,” first in a three-part series? Have half the readership howling in protest — how gullible does she think we are? — and the other half applauding for all the wrong reasons: looove the irony.

One crisis at a time, please.

She looked at the clock again — 6:26.

Gabrielle heard from the bathroom the heavy plop of water as it dripped from the faucet into the tub. Odd — it sounded as though the tub were full. Which couldn’t be. She’d always used the shower. Never even stoppered the drain in the first place.

Austin would be here at 10:00. Give or take. He’d follow her to Salt Lake City, where she’d turn in the rental and hope his car was sound enough to endure to the east coast.

That dripping — a full tub, definitely. She listened to it for a few moments, perplexed; but a pleasant sound if you were in the mood. Promise of warmth and steam on a winter day, or a cool soak on one like today. But as her head cleared of the morning groggies the more she realized it shouldn’t have been promising anything right now.

When she got up to check, Gabrielle halted in the bathroom doorway. The tub could wait.

She knew without the slightest prompt that this was Austin’s woman. Scarlett, sitting on the toilet lid. It couldn’t be anyone else. In a town this size, she and Austin would find each other because there was something barbaric about the both of them, although Austin seemed to have bested it. And what had he implied — the relationship was only physical? In that case, she didn’t need to see Scarlett at all. This was a woman whose bodily tenure you really didn’t want to follow.

“How did you get in here?”

The faucet, dripping. The ripples, gentle across the water.

When Scarlett stood up, Gabrielle saw her arm, Hadn’t noticed it until now, the way Scarlett had been holding it down and out of view. Saw the smear of blood along the inside of her forearm. Saw something jutting from — oh god.

“You’re hurt,” Gabrielle said. The woman had come here to commit suicide, was that it? For the statement it made?

But no. It wasn’t Scarlett’s wrist that was the problem. Whatever was stuck into her was emerging from a split across the palm, just above the heel of her hand. Wide and flat and dense, almost blade-like, a cleaver or short machete. But not the color of metal. No, this was pale, almost a bone-white, and—

It was bone. And it was extruding by itself, as though a deformed extension of the bones of her lower arm had grown out through her hand.

Gabrielle understood then. If not everything, enough.

“But your eyes,” she said. “They’re both…”

“You don’t think we have control over them too? When we really don’t want someone to know?”

“Can’t you just leave us alone?” It was the closest thing to a prayer she would offer this creature. Austin’s demon lover. “God damn you, just leave us alone and let us have our lives.”

“Don’t blame us for what’s in your heart,” Scarlett said. “He’s much, much too old for you.”

*

“We have no need of bodies to exist, but will wear them if we wish to. We gather them from the elements around us and manipulate them as we need. The Kyyth have never restricted ourselves to the human body, but we love it most. Because it is you that we are most alike.

“Through these bodies we seek to bring you wonder. More than hope, or healing, even more than comfort, wonder is our greatest gift, because it’s what makes you most like us. We work to teach you to open your eyes to the magnificent mystery all around you, by showing glimpses of possibilities beyond what is familiar and known to you.

“The greater your sense of wonder, the further into our arms you run, and the more like each other we become…”

*

Austin found them as soon as he opened the door to the shack, because sometime late in the night, or not long after dawn, they’d been set there on the weathered planks, side by side like a pair of shoes waiting to be shined.

He collapsed to both knees when they failed him, and crawled forward to pull free the note left behind, weighted down by those first two things he was meant to find.

What a privilege that you were able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances, the note read. Child-size to full-grown … and now at last in decay.

Her feet. Gabrielle’s feet.

He scrambled off the edge of the porch to fall into dust that caked around his mouth and clogged his nostrils when he screamed.

What a privilege…

Thoughts, they’d only been thoughts — he’d not even spoken them aloud to Gabrielle herself. Who but the Kyyth could steal these things from the deepest wells inside him? Who but the Kyyth could use them so viciously against him? Who but the Kyyth would even think to try?

Who but the Kyyth might invest some deeper purpose in this, perhaps leaving her hobbled but still alive?

Austin began to run along the road as the sun climbed higher and shadows shrank toward their sources, breathing air so still and hot it seemed to lack only fumes of sulfur. The horizon rippled and the world rolled, then he was there on that holy ground named for a dead mule.

He had no time to wonder why Miracle seemed so atypically busy this morning, as though it had shaken off sleep to awaken refreshed and restored. Its residents, old and new, were flinging themselves out the doors of home and shop and diner. They abandoned cars in the street and sometimes even left the engines running. Some laughed like mad fools while others stumbled along with tears streaming from eyes bright with joy. They collided with him. Some kissed him while others even tried to detain him with a hug. He shoved them out of his way and pushed on.

On a quieter block, the doors to the bed-and-breakfast stood wide. Inside he saw meals sitting on the dining room table, half-eaten with no one to finish them. A spindle-back chair lying on its side; a telephone receiver dangling down the wall by its cord.

He called for her but she didn’t answer, and since he didn’t know which room was hers he searched them all until he found her in a tubful of red water. She still wore the shirt and shorts that she’d worn yesterday. Her legs just ended, in blunt tapers, the only sign of the violence that would’ve taken place here. The pale, waxen hand clutching the side of the tub was reposed, no rictus claw, and her head tilted back against the wall, sightless eyes staring toward the door. With confusion. With expectation. With wonder.

He hauled her from the tub, carrying her out into the heat of day, and now he joined that savage and clamorous throng who filled the streets. A straggler, one of the last, with Gabrielle’s head limp on his shoulder and the bled-clean ankles banging against his thigh, and if anyone noticed the condition of her they said nothing, because it was a day of miracles.

Their angel had returned, in the full splendor of their need and expectations.

It was a Memuneh that he’d never seen, stripped now and all but naked except for a white cloth wound modestly about his waist and loins. His skin was as creamy pale as the oil paints of a Botticelli or a Caravaggio, and his thighs chubbier than Austin remembered, plump and pleasing as a cherub’s.

But above the waist he was monstrous, as if he’d attempted to redefine his body to satisfy the demands of both aesthetics and logic. The wingspan he’d grown was huge, some forty feet, and the skeletal additions to anchor it grotesque. A great twin slab of breastbone jutted from the middle of his chest, roped over with muscle mass, and up from his back towered a spine that forced his head forward and stretched the skin of his shoulders into a fin like a dolphin’s.

He held his arms outstretched, wide and inviting, and the wings flapped with such force they could be heard even above the hubbub of the crowd. Whatever song he’d been trying to sing to them was drowned out, and the wings weren’t even white, but a mottled desert brown. Like a hawk’s.

Memuneh hovered where his light had been seen months ago, before the top floor of the hotel, scant yards away from the windows of the room where yesterday morning Austin had tasted a dozen deaths. And where was Scarlett? The entire town, it seemed, was crowded around the hotel’s foundation, screaming and crying and reaching for this messenger of the divine, while trampling those who fell beneath their eager feet.

But was it even happening? The furious unreality — this was only the latest in a lifetime of moments when Austin had wondered if it all hadn’t been some elaborate projection arcing through his mind as he fell from the train toward its wheels, sure to clip him off at the ankle, if not higher.

Or maybe he was still in the tunnel after falling clear but striking his head, waiting to awaken to the rough hands and reeking breath of the men nobody wanted, driven out and sent to live along the tracks.

Over the heads of the crowd their gazes met, and when the Kyyth’s eyes settled on the bundle in Austin’s arms, Memuneh began to cry. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell on the crowd like raindrops, and they wailed with delight and waved their hands for more, opening mouths and wagging tongues as if for Eucharists or snowflakes.

The tilt of his wings changed and Memuneh began to drift groundward. Austin hadn’t wanted to believe it and now, with those copious tears, he knew that this murder could not have been Memuneh’s work. Memuneh may have been a liar but his heart was too soft to slay anything.

Yet would he have enough heart to undo the butchery of another? Mend the damage, reinfuse the drained blood? Cheat death?

Memuneh’s bare soles touched down on the asphalt thirty feet away, but before he could take two steps they swarmed him. He was engulfed in a clutching tide of hands and devotion, and soon all that was visible were his wings, beating at the heads of the crowd. Feathers were ripped out in tufts, quills and all, then even these vast limbs disappeared, churned into the frenzied rapture. Moments later, above the mob rose a triumphant fist, clutching a heart.

Austin turned to carry her away from the sight and was in the next block, almost as far as the road home before he dared to turn and look back.

Someone had taken the severed wings to the hotel roof and now stood at its edge. Austin recognized him — a teenage boy with a mongoloid face and a child’s mind, brought here months ago for a healing that had never been bestowed. He now held the skewed twists of membrane and tatter and hollow bone, teetering against blue sky, then he leapt, plummeting toward a crowd that scattered in panic and left him to strike the street alone.

Austin didn’t wait to see what they did with him next.

He carried Gabrielle past the edge of town, into that desert where it seemed he’d always lived. He stared into the face that lay against his shoulder, then looked for it in the sky, in the fleece of passing clouds.

How she shined. How she shined.

Sweat flowed and muscles began to scream, but no magick this time, no folding of the land upon itself. He would carry her the entire distance back, to reunite her with the pieces that had been plundered.

He would carry her every mile. Every yard. Every foot.

*

“All we desire is to coax you toward everything you are meant to be. But because your lives are short, it’s hard for you to comprehend all that exists and ever has and ever will. So we fan the flames of your wonder.

“There are Kyyth who have grown the bodies of pleisiosaurs around themselves and live in deep lakes, to remind you of a past your kind never knew. There are Kyyth who take on bodies that are neither human nor ape but somewhere between, and wander mountains and dense forests, to remind you of your own origins and how far you’ve come. The Kyyth have worn the flesh of things you yourselves have made up in your minds, because if you desired to believe in them that much, then that was all the justification they needed to be real.

“And in these ways we hope to bring you to belief in yourself, and the exalted position you hold…”

*

And the air smelled of ash.

Austin stood in smoke wafting from her pyre and watched the smudge it made against the sky. As it ebbed into a haze he ducked into the shack long enough to grab a simple stick.

He sat on the ground and drew a few spirals in the dirt, from center outward with a clockwise twist. The air at the center of each would shimmer like heat-haze on a horizon before coalescing into a tiny whirlwind. He let them spin, fattening on their own momentum.

But whereas before he would bring his palm down to squash them, now he only snapped the stick and walked away.

*

“It is all out of love for you…”

*

Around noon on the day that Miracle was wiped from the face of the earth, they later stated for the record, the surviving crew of the southbound Union Pacific freight train that passed through the town witnessed a bizarre chaos in its streets. There was both violence and jubilation, as if a street fair had turned on itself. A few minutes and a few miles later they were still puzzling this over when the engines rounded a bend that cut between a pair of craggy red mesas and, on emerging, put them on their collision course with the cyclones.

Four, they saw — then three, then two, and finally one, the largest of this nest of whirlwinds sucking up each of the others and growing mightier with each meal. Their combined furies swelled into a towering colossus of dark umber that dwarfed the sandstone spires and blotted out the sky. It flexed in place for several moments, then as if with deliberate intent roared across the desert floor toward the tracks.

There was no time to react, no place else to steer, nothing to do except pray. But God, they said later, must’ve had His heart set on a cataclysm that day. The engines had already passed by, but the caboose was still to come and the long snaking body of the train most vulnerable in between.

The column of wind hit, lifting the nearest freight cars from the tracks like links in the middle of a chain. The rest derailed and, from the center out toward both ends, began a slow, grinding corkscrew as they were pulled back toward the middle.

But maybe there was some small nod of mercy in the turbulent air that day. Hydraulic lines blew and couplings wrenched apart like soft lead as the whirlwind took its due and left the rest. While a pair of boxcars were plucked along with them, the cyclone seemed as selective as any arbitrary act of God, as a string of five tanker cars filled with liquid propane was sucked aloft, white capsules clenched inside a giant brown fist.

The cyclone retreated from the tracks then, to steer a new course. Toward Miracle, on its day of days.

There the whirlwind faltered and died and dropped its burden. The crew in the caboose felt the heat and blast wave from three miles away. The clouds of flame they described boiled high enough to challenge Heaven, and then fell back.

*

“But our love for you is not that of a parent for its children. We would never be so presumptuous. Because we know our place. Instead, our love is the love of older brothers and sisters for their younger siblings, even though we know that you will grow to be greater than we could ever hope to be.

“And while I cannot tell you why … that’s as it was always meant to be.”

*

He may have awakened that morning as Austin McCoy, but now he wasn’t convinced it was as simple as that. Dragons stirring inside his mind, wings unfurling inside his soul, and a body that felt ready to collapse.

Would Austin McCoy have scrubbed an entire town out of existence? Not the Austin who’d awakened a few hours ago. Never him. But this one would, and had. In forward motion, every minute since spent outrunning those discoveries on his porch and in Gabrielle’s tub. He could never get far enough away.

From the desolate high stage of a mesa he watched it burn, and from the first moments when those fiery blooms rolled across the landscape, obliterating the town and scalding streets into tar, he realized something that he’d never suspected before. His cells tingled with the knowledge and the kinship, made of stuff that had been around since the beginning of time … and remembered, even if he hadn’t. Now he understood his species’ fascination with explosions. They weren’t acts of destruction so much as instants of creation, echoes of the bang that had set everything in motion, giving birth to mountains, men, and mites.

Not bad for a day’s work.

He came down from the mesa when the firestorm retreated back to the town proper, so he could watch from ground level — at least as long as it would take until the sky filled with helicopters and planes, and the road brought an army of rescuers with nothing to do but wait to rake the ashes.

Dry as it was, the ground steamed beneath his boots. A fat green fly lit upon his shoulder. He almost swatted it, but let it crawl there instead. You never knew. You just never knew.

And, unlikely as this seemed to him, he realized that he and the fly weren’t the only things here left alive.

It came walking out of the fields of fire, moving toward him on two good legs, and when it came close enough to touch he could feel the scorching radiance from its body.

“Well done,” it said. Voice still that of a woman who could captivate with nuance and a glance. “Sodom and Gomorrah couldn’t have gone any better. They’ll wonder about this for ages.”

She’d come to him as a casualty of his grief and rage, but even at that she had allowed herself a bizarre beauty. Ever vain. She was naked as could be, a burn victim with all the crust and crisp scraped away, leaving the tight shiny pinkness underneath. Her hair was gone, her lips were gone, her nose was a bump and a pair of slits; her ears had shriveled against her skull; even her breasts were tiny now. Every spare ounce had been seared away. She looked like a snake on two legs.

“I know you’re too proud to ask why,” she said.

Scarlett. He still thought of her as Scarlett. But Scarlett was nothing but illusion. A means to a cruel end.

“So let’s talk of Gabrielle. Do you want me to tell you she didn’t suffer? Fine. She didn’t suffer. There — is that what you want?”

He said nothing.

“What — it wasn’t supposed to be this way? Of course it was. If you insisted on clinging to her, this was exactly what it was supposed to be like. Gabrielle wasn’t here to be taught by you. She wasn’t here to forgive you. And especially she wasn’t here to take you home. You are home … or as close as you’ve ever been.”

“But I love her,” he whispered.

“And I love you,” she said.

With the toe of his boot he drew a spiral in the blackened dirt. She erased it with a gleaming raw foot and reptilian smile, and looked back over her shoulder toward the heart of the inferno.

“Memuneh?” she said. “It’s not even his name. Did you know that?”

“I’d suspected.”

“He robbed it from your own folklore. ‘Dispenser of dreams. Defender in Heaven of his earthly wards.’ Sound familiar?”

Austin shut his eyes. Yes. Yes, it did. Sentimental treacle, lactated to suckle babies in the darkest nights of their souls.

“But he’s right about one thing. We are here for you. We save you from your own inertia.”

Illusion. She wasn’t really there.

“If it wasn’t for the Kyyth, you’d all still be in trees. Pats on the head and full plates don’t move you very far. If they did, dogs would be building cities and reaching for the stars. No, the only thing that really moves you forward is your own agony. Trying to outrun it. So. Who are you going to believe — me or him?”

Behind her the inferno roared, tightening his skin and drying out his eyes, yet he stared into its seething core, at the shapes hinted at beyond its flaming veil. The shells of buildings, the slag of ambition.

“Did he tell you what our name means?” she asked.

A nod. “Bridge. He told Gabrielle it meant bridge.”

Her lipless mouth compressed into a slitted line. “That’s his own folklore. But if you want to know? Once upon a time there lived a civilization that nobody’s found yet. I won’t tell you where, but you’d recognize the name of the river. They owed much of their existence to their beasts of burden. But the only way to drive those simple animals forward was by using a whip. Or if you prefer their word for it, a kyyth. And if that was the name they gave us, what of it? Nothing since has been more accurate. Nothing since has described us better.”

If he couldn’t take Memuneh at his word, why take Scarlett at hers? She seemed to smell his doubt through the smoke, while he looked past her into the fiery aftermath of the great blast and wondered what had been created here today.

“You’re close, you’re so close,” she said, then stepped up to kiss him with that lipless mouth and a feathery hot tickle of her tongue. “Remember…”

And in that moment’s intimacy, like so many other times when their membranes touched, it was as though something seeped from her and her world into him, another spark of recognition

—he felt the claws of a leopard crack open the bony little cage of his chest—

and she stepped away and let him buckle to the ground with the full bloody flavor of it, telling him that’s right, embrace it all over again, and all of the others since. Savor the pain of each and every death and feel their lashes up and down his back, and now Gabrielle’s too, his love for her the last thing holding him to a world that he no longer had to bother with. Go ahead. Let it hurt. Let it cut. Let it burn.

She leaned over him and stared down.

“You were the first ugly, hairy little thing that ever stood on two legs and shook your fist and refused to die,” she said. “So you didn’t. Body after body — you never gave up, did you?”

He rubbed a fistful of dirt and ashes into his hair because they were the only things that seemed real now. The only things that he wanted to feel, solid and worthless, but genuine.

“Say cursum perficio, Austin. You did it. But I can’t whip you along any further. These last steps? You’ll have to take them on your own.”

She helped him up and he stood, dust sifting from his skull, and with watering eyes he looked at what lay ahead. Flames washed over it like rapids over rocks worn smooth, but it did not burn. He could see it now — mansion and castle and forest and field. All one. All waiting. Elizium, empty and his.

“It’s time to go take your place, and wait,” she said. “That was the plan.”

“Wait for…?”

“The rest.” She caressed his cheek and nodded. Tapped him on the forehead. “Where do you think God went, anyway?”

From the distant sky, the deep beat of a helicopter’s rotors; from the far road, whirling blue lights and sirens in mourning.

Cursum perficio.

I win the race.

With dirt for a crown and smoke for a laurel, I win the race.

She squeezed his hand. “There isn’t much time now. I can walk with you. But I can’t force you.”

No. He was falling from the train. He was bleeding in the tunnel. He was murdering a coyote to give a voice to demons. He was anywhere but here.

“You’re lying,” he said. “All of you. You’ve lied all along.”

“One way to find out.” She raised her free arm to show him the way, through flame and wreckage and molten tar. “It’s only flesh, Austin. Turn loose. You don’t need it anymore.”

The first step was tentative; the next, a little less so. And so on. And so on. His hair caught fire in a rush like warm breath, then his clothing. The flames feasted deeper, but it only hurt for a moment, until he remembered how to make the sensation stop.

He began to remember everything then, all over again, from quasars to quarks. He knew the instincts of atoms and the majestic loneliness of stars. They were strewn above and below, and how they shined. He would start with the nearest, and if she wasn’t there, he would move along to the next, and the next, and the next until he found her, because still, it would never be Paradise without her.

Let me tell you about eternity.

He remembered everything.

He laughed.