21

FAMILY REUNION

“Uh, can I come in?”

Molly gestured toward the apartment she glimpsed behind Martin. He’d done nothing but stare since opening the door. It was awkward. And the hallway smelled like piss.

He retreated. She entered. He tackled her in a bear hug. The toes of her boots left the ground. Had she still been mortal her ribs would have creaked beneath the mountainous weight of his relief, her breath snuffed by his desperation. But she was something different now, something whose lungs were no less an affectation than her earrings.

Not that she had kept every last vestige of her human body. She hadn’t had her period since she died.

“I was starting to think I imagined it,” he said into her hair. He clung to tactile proof of her presence.

“Hey. Didn’t I promise to come back?”

A sheepish pause. “Yeah.”

“I keep my promises. Also?”

“Yeah?”

“You can put me down now.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He did, more gently than he’d ever done anything in her presence. More gently than when Blue, their slobbery Newfoundland, was dying of bone cancer, and had to be put down, and Mom and Dad had given them a final chance to say good-bye.

She sniffed his breath, tasted nothing more damning than beer and cigarettes on his aura. She wasn’t crazy about the beer—he shouldn’t be having any alcohol. But it was an acceptable compromise under the circumstances. She couldn’t expect him to abandon all of his vices. Not all at once, and not after what he’d been through. After what she’d put him through.

Martin looked her up and down. “Moll. You look … healthy.” To his shoes, he added, “Alive.” And then he blushed in embarrassment for stating something so obviously impossible. It was something a strung-out junkie might have said. Might have believed.

“I’m glad one of us does. Because you look like hell.”

“I know.”

His shoulders slumped, the big goof, so she chucked his chin with her thumb. “It’s a huge improvement compared to what I saw when I first came to visit. After the accident.”

Martin looked at her, wide-eyed, looking again like a confused and eager puppy. “You were here?”

“You were”—She started to say “out of it,” but decided delicacy would do him no favors.—“stoned out of your mind. I didn’t let you see me.”

He closed the door. She kicked her boots into a corner and flopped onto the futon, one leg folded under her. The wooden slats of the futon frame pressed straight through the useless mattress into her shin. Martin looked ready to cry. He’d seen her do this a thousand times.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s really me.”

“Do you want something to drink? Or eat?”

She remembered the roaches in the kitchen. A slight funk wafted from that direction, noticeable even to her human senses. “No. I want to catch up with my brother.”

The futon creaked under his weight. He fidgeted, cracking his knuckles, lacing and unlacing his fingers. She let him take his time. This had to be done on his terms. Plus, she admitted to herself, the more time she spent with Martin the longer she could put off dealing with Bayliss.

Finally, Martin said, “I watched you die. The memory is so bad, so vivid … And it’s not just that. There was a funeral. A memorial service.” He reached over to pluck the program from the wall. More tactile proof that he wasn’t nuts. The tape made a gentle tearing sound.

“You didn’t imagine it,” said Molly. “It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t a bad trip. It happened.”

It was supposed to be reassuring. Instead, it terrified him. His nostrils flared; his heart rate spiked. He was trying to be logical about this. Good for Martin.

“I’m afraid this means I’ve gone crazy. Or maybe I’m still high and hallucinating now.”

“The fact you realize this is crazy probably means you’re sane. A crazy person would think it’s sane to have a conversation with his dead sister.” She gave a smile that she hoped was comforting. “And you’re not tripping, are you?”

He thought about it. “No. I did, a lot, right after … whatever it was … happened. But then it was like somebody pressed a button and I couldn’t get a fix any longer. It hurt. I needed it so bad.”

“That was me. I’ve been watching over you.” At this, he stared again. “Please don’t be mad,” she added.

“I wasted a lot of money.”

She touched his elbow. “Your life is worth more.”

Martin scraped the back of his hand across his eyes. “Every time I close my eyes I see you falling off the platform. It’s like a movie playing behind my eyelids, stuck on an endless loop I can’t turn off. Your body hits the tracks, and the train skids over you, and the snow turns black, and the smell…”

The memory of anguish hit her in stereo, coming from both Martin and herself. Molly swallowed gorge. She tried to dodge the sensation of her body coming apart.

Desperation constricted Martin’s voice. “What did happen, Moll? What’s happening to us?”

“Do you remember a guy on the platform with us?”

“No.”

“Well, he was there. He came up to us earlier that night, in the laneway, to bum a cigarette from you. Remember? I was looking at the sky?”

“I guess. I dunno.” Martin frowned. “Maybe. Kind of a strange guy, right? He talked weird.”

“That’s him.”

“What about him?”

“He wasn’t human.” Martin blinked. Molly shrugged. “I told you this was going to be a long conversation.”

*   *   *

She drained the last of her iced tea. Martin plucked an abandoned sliver of pepperoni from the stone platter balanced on the oversized can of tomato paste set in the middle of their table. They had taken a taxi to Uptown, near the lakes. This had seemed a good choice: familiar surroundings; she used to cajole Martin into meeting her here every couple of months, so that they could catch up and she could keep an eye on him. Where else would they have this conversation? It would have been cheaper to take the light rail, if it served Martin’s neighborhood, but even so he would have refused to stand on another train platform with her. Nor was she terribly keen on it. It was a fucked-up memory for both of them.

The pizza wasn’t as good as she remembered. The neighborhood wasn’t, either. She’d ruined it for herself when she’d done her best to kill Ria just a few blocks from here. She confessed to him about that. Now she was thinking about it again, wrapped in the sticky tendrils of what she’d done, and he could read it in her face because he was her brother.

It was Martin’s turn to give a reassuring touch. “You didn’t know.”

“He did try to warn me. Bayliss. I almost did it to you, too, right after I died. Right there on the platform. That would have been it for the Pruett kids, huh?” Molly choked on a sob when she couldn’t manage a laugh. “She looks so small in that hospital bed. Too small to contain the woman trapped inside.”

“Ria was okay. I always thought she could have been a little nicer to you, though.”

“C’mon, Martin. Don’t be a creep.”

“Sorry,” he said, punctuating the apology with another squeeze to her elbow. He wrapped an unused straw around his ring finger, released it, watched it unspool. “You should be able to fix her. Just reach in and…” He touched his temple with a twisting motion of his fingertip.

“It’s not that easy.”

“It can’t be harder than anything else you’ve done since Australia.” Since Australia. That was the comfortable euphemism on which they’d settled. Because clearly, whatever Bayliss had done to her, she wasn’t dead in the conventional sense.

“I understand so many things I never did before. But people are so, so complicated.” Molly pressed a crumpled paper napkin to her face. It stung her eyes with pepperoni grease. With a voice like the smoke from an extinguished candle, she admitted, “I’m terrified to try. There’s one way to fix it. A million ways to make it worse.” She blew her nose. “Fucking entropy.”

Martin said, “You use a lot of words you never used to.” He changed his posture, and the topic. “Mom’s lawyer arranged to have all her stuff shipped to me. But I didn’t stick around in Australia to help with packing up and selling her house. I wanted to get away from there as soon as I could after … well, you know. So they hired a service to do it, but between that and the overseas shipping it ate a big chunk of the money she left behind.”

Molly nodded. They had gone to Melbourne for their mother’s funeral. Their folks had put an entire ocean between them after divorcing. Mom had fled to Australia while Dad stayed in Canada. “I’d have done the same thing. She had too much crap, anyway.”

“You’re entitled to half of it. Mom’s crap, and the rest of the money. There’s a storage unit.”

Molly wondered if their mother still had those old New Age books that mentioned the Pleroma. It might have been amusing to sift through those. Not enough to justify the trouble, though. She shook her head.

“It’s not like I have to pay rent anymore. Keep the stuff you really want, and sell the rest. Don’t waste money on a storage unit, Martin. Put it in the bank instead. But if you even think about spending it on—”

“I know. Dad always said you were the practical one.”

“I miss him. Mom, too.”

“Yeah.”

*   *   *

The sun had set by the time they emerged from the mediocre pizzeria. They walked along Lagoon toward the lakes. Molly steered them in another direction, around the block and up Hennepin. Early evening on a weekend night; the massage parlors and fast-food places did a brisk turn of business. Their stroll took them across the light-rail tracks. Both made a point of not noticing them. Penitentes loitered outside a former art-house theater that had been split apart and converted into a halal loan service, a police substation, and a franchise stand selling lenses and earbuds. Molly stepped warily, but none approached. None carried a secret angel.

They walked through clouds of conversation in Somali, Hmong, Hindi, Spanish, and Malay. Molly had once been told that the dining landscape in Minneapolis—in landlocked cities all over the world—had changed irrevocably after the global diaspora from what used to be coastal areas. Cold comfort to the refugees, no doubt.

Martin kept an eye on the streets. At first she thought he was trying to be chivalrous, overprotective, before she realized he was taking note of bus stops.

“Hey. When we’re ready to go back,” she said, “let’s do it my way.”

He smiled. “Can we? I’d really like that.”

“Sure.”

The combined glow of moon and city lights washed away the stars. But the brightest shooting stars, the most enthusiastic space debris, still etched luminous hairline fractures across the sky. A flare caught Molly’s eye. She stopped on the sidewalk, looking up. She thought about Gabriel’s murder, and her own. Martin turned, joined her, looked up.

“What do you see when you look up there?”

“Same as you. Moon. Night. Space junk.”

“That’s it?”

Molly shunted aside her human vision. She studied this evening in the city with senses that had no names.

“I feel the whisper of ionosphere slithering over the debris as it skims into the atmosphere. Hearing me say that caused you a nervous thrill; your sweat just became more alkaline. I can taste that on the air because the heightened pulse in your throat is wafting that sweat my way. The breeze—oh—the breeze sheds beautiful eddies when it breaks around your body. I wish you could see them. If I concentrate I can hear the hum and rattle of the cement mixer that produced these sidewalk slabs however many years ago. The electricity in the lights overhead and in the conduits beneath our feet is a metallic buzz flickering across my skin.” A brilliant shooting star arced overhead, cleaving the night. “That was chunk of solar array. The light came from the unzipping and recombining of cadmium atoms. I just know that somehow. With concentration, I can feel the electrons peeling away one at a time like popcorn kernels going off in an air popper. If I close one eye and squint, I can see gravity, how the curvature of space and time tugs at that debris, and the moon, and you.” She paused. “And I’m pretty sure that if I really tried—and didn’t mind the migraine—I could probably lick the mechanism giving rise to that curvature. The stuff behind the curtain, the stuff scientists haven’t yet cracked.”

When she looked down again, Martin was staring at her rather than the sky. He didn’t blink. It gave her goose bumps. “What?” she asked.

“Why are you even down here, Moll?”

The question, and the thready way he asked it, made her shiver. So she dodged it.

“Don’t be a goof,” she said.

“I mean it. Why do you bother with the rest of us?”

This was worse than losing her connection to humanity. This was humanity losing its connection to her. Her own brother didn’t know what to make of her, didn’t understand that she still had human emotions. Like the loneliness that pierced her through at that moment.

“Where else would I go? This is home.”

*   *   *

She took him home via the Pleroma. It wasn’t the easiest thing she’d ever done, yet it wasn’t quite as difficult as when she hauled Anne through her Magisterium to elude the Cherubim. At least the walls didn’t sag like candle wax while Martin marveled at the reconstructed apartment.

Molly created a door from her Magisterium to his place. Martin started to step through, but stopped.

“Wait,” he said. “Before we leave, can I, um, can I see what you really look like now?”

“Doofus. I look like your sister.”

“I know. But there’s more now. Right?”

It was a fair question. She said, “Okay. But you have to promise not to freak out. Just remember I’m still me, regardless of what it might look like.”

“I promise.”

And so it was there, in the reimagined and reconstructed memory of the kitchen she once shared with Ria, that Molly set aside her human form and showed her brother what she had become. The transition went more smoothly than it had in Bayliss’s hotel room. She dialed it back when Martin flinched and shielded his eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked, momentarily consumed with a vision of bloody tears streaking Bayliss’s face.

“Oh, Moll,” said Martin. He was crying. Not blood, though. “They turned you into starlight.”

*   *   *

“You have to admit,” he said, sprawled on the futon, speaking with breath redolent of onions and garlic, “it’s pretty fucking cool. The angels.”

“That’s exactly what Anne said.”

“Is she the girl I met?”

“Woman. Yes. And you might feel differently if you ever met some of those jacktards.”

“They really don’t care about us at all?”

“No. Sort of the opposite. They’re pretty resentful. They call us ‘monkeys.’”

“Geez.”

“Yeah.”

“Still,” said Martin, “it’s kind of hard to swallow. I mean, I believe you, but it’s like…”

“… Like the entire human world is just the skin of a soap bubble filled to bursting with angels and the Voice of God and conflicting notions of reality. Yet somehow nobody has ever noticed,” said Molly.

“Yeah. I mean you’re here, now, and that alone is proof,” Martin said. “Just by coming here and talking to me you’ve probably overthrown, I dunno, like, ten thousand years worth of science. And that’s even before I saw a piece of the, uh, what did you call it?”

“My Magisterium.”

“‘Magisterium.’ Wild. It’s a little freaky that we’re all living in the edges of this tremendous secret.”

“Nobody has ever received the truth before now,” said Molly, voicing the revelation as it came to her. “I guess I’m the only angel who ever bothered to share it.”

After all, Martin had a point. Once Bayliss picked her (why?) for a peek behind the curtain, it was inevitable that part of Molly would begin see the human experience as having all the gravitas of shadow puppets capering on a cave wall. Or however it went; she vaguely remembered reading something about that in college before dropping the philosophy class. But that was beside the point. The tenuous nature of the mortal realm became obvious when seen from the proper perspective. Humanity’s continual ignorance of their situation seemed almost cruel. The comforting myths of an afterlife, or reincarnation, or a plan and purpose to the universe had persisted for millennia.

But on the other hand, why should the angels bother to enlighten the monkeys? Hell, they couldn’t even manifest in the mortal realm without causing permanent damage to the humans around them. It seemed the merest glimpse of an angel was enough to cause an aneurysm. Hence the penitentes and their hollowed-out souls. But it wasn’t because they cared; it was just a dodge to avoid ticking off METATRON. Otherwise the naked angels would have left hundreds of Rias in their wake. Except Bayliss. He didn’t need a hollowed-out human to get around on Earth. Strange.

The angels couldn’t care less about the human condition. Except me, thought Molly. She was different. She was a product of that tenuous, pointless, mortal realm. She had family, and friends, people she loved and people she hated. And she’d fought to maintain her connection to her old life. In contrast to the rest of the Choir, Molly had no reason not to share the truth of things. For that alone, Molly was entirely distinct from everything else in the Choir. She was unique, something quite apart from the other angels.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Merciless as an avalanche, it suffocated her with a deeper understanding of Bayliss’s intent. Earlier, thanks to Anne, she had realized Bayliss wanted her to use the Trumpet in a fit of anger. Now she knew why: because she differed from the other angels. Crucially.

Molly stood. Paced. She didn’t have all of it yet, every single step, but she understood enough to know what she’d do next. Enough to know she had to say good-bye soon, and that it might be permanent. At least she had a chance to say it this time.

Martin said, “You look very serious all of a sudden.”

“I was thinking—”

It kept coming, the avalanche. It hit her hard. Hard enough to chip a tooth, if her teeth had been breakable things not made of thought. She was thinking about good-byes, and what they meant for a creature such as her.

Regardless of what happened to her, of what happened when she confronted Bayliss, the passage of mortal time would always ensure a final, permanent good-bye. She could do almost anything, but she couldn’t hold her friends and loved ones forever. Martin would die someday. Sooner than later, if his vices won. So would Ria, and Anne, and everybody she’d ever known. Every human presently alive—she’d outlive them all, if she survived the next few hours.

It was one thing to strive for connection when you had people. But what would become of Molly a hundred years from now? She wasn’t fully an angel, not by their standards—she’d never be a true member of the Choir, not that she cared—and yet she wouldn’t pass on like a mortal. A woman without a nation; a homeless hybrid.

Would she spend the rest of eternity constantly running up the down escalator, mourning dead connections and desperately seeking new ones? How many centuries would it take before the loneliness and loss became so great that she eschewed the last vestiges of her old human ways? When she surrendered and become something else? Would she remember Ria a hundred years from now? A thousand? Would she remember Martin a million years from now? Would she remember being a human named Molly?

Forever, she now saw with bowel-churning clarity, was a very, very long time. Molly stared into both barrels of an eternity spent alone, and it was fucking terrifying. It felt like a bucketful of rancid butter in her gut. She stumbled. Martin caught her elbow.

“What’s up?”

“I need a hug,” she sobbed. Martin obliged.

Maybe he and Ria were the lucky ones after all. They would never know a thousand years of loneliness. A million.

How long would it be, after the last of Molly’s earthly connections disappeared, before she started haunting human gatherings like a ghost? Trying to thaw a frostbitten soul by holding it up to the feeble flickering of humanity? Or would she slowly become another Bayliss, a cynical shit building paper-thin simulacra of people just to have somebody to banter with?

No. Not that. She’d never be like Bayliss. Better to be alone.

Or was it? Would that lonely eternity be better than dying? Because if she failed … Molly wondered what it would be like to die a second time. Angels could die; she most of all. And that frightened her just as much as eternal loneliness. Maybe more.

She knew what it was to die. Death was cold metal, black snow, her viscera …

She couldn’t face it a second time. It would be worse the second time. So much worse. Her first death had been unforeseen, unanticipated. What would it be like to die as an angel, perceiving the moment with ten thousand nameless senses, already knowing death intimately from her final human experience?

But those were her only choices: eternal loneliness or a second death immeasurably worse than the first.

Martin’s wall display emitted a loud zap of static electricity. Bluish smoke wafted from a crack in the wall.

He started. “What the hell?”

“Sorry,” she said. “That kind of stuff happens when I get upset.”

He started at the broken display. “Wow.”

“I have to go soon. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” She pulled away, then stood. “It might be a long time.” I might end up like Gabriel. The thought gave rise to a nagging sensation at the back of her mind. She pushed it aside for the moment. “But hey. At least we get to have a proper good-bye this time.”

“You’ve already come back from the dead once. I don’t know much about much,” said Martin, “but I know better than to say good-bye.”

She tried to give a reassuring laugh, but it turned into a hiccup, then another sob.

He said, “I can tell something’s wrong.”

“Just tired. And a little frightened about what the future might bring.” She pulled him to his feet. “But that’s a problem for later. Right now, I want to try to do something for you. Do you trust me?”

“You know I do.”

Thanks to her interference, Martin had gone long enough without a fix that he was well on the way to recovery. But he’d always think of himself as a hopeless, broken failure unless she made a show of fixing him. She had to give him a tangible reason to believe better of himself.

“Close your eyes. I’m going to reach in and take something out of you. It won’t hurt.”

He knew what she meant. He didn’t object.

*   *   *

The game on the radio was just getting interesting—bases loaded, DiMaggio stepping into the box—when Sam returned. I don’t know if Joltin’ Joe made the grand slam because the play-by-play faded into a staticky bossa-nova rendering of the Chords of Creation.

The Powers have crummy timing. Ask anybody.

“You couldn’t have waited until the end of the inning?”

Sam enveloped a stool beside me in a roiling cloud of lightning-bright ash. “You’d be more angry if I waited.”

There was a hitch in its voice, a hiss or gurgle in that rasp of melting sapphires. I set down my cup. The dregs were cold anyway.

“Skim it,” I said. “Just give me the cream.”

“Your monkey just entered the Pleroma,” said Sam. “Not her Magisterium. She’s in the between-spaces, heading for the Nephilim.”

I tapped a pill on the counter. Flicked a paper match into life with my thumbnail. “You sure?”

Sam said, “Whatever comes of your experiment, she isn’t subtle. She leaves a wake.”

Okay. So their timing is lousy. But I still have a soft spot for the Powers and their holographic ontologies. Plenty useful, these jaspers.

“What’s she doing out there?”

“My guess?” A sulfurous fume roiled across the countertop. Flo swooned. “She’s close to piecing it together. Suspicious.”

I lit the pill and treated myself to a long draw. Savoring the taste of my instincts paying off like a long-shot trifecta, I said, modestly, “That’s why I picked her.”

Sam’s smoke plume glowed white and blue with a constant flicker of electrical discharge. Back in the kitchen, the cook slapped the radio a couple of times. Sam said, “Don’t break your arm, patting yourself on the back like that.”

I tapped cigarette ashes into one of Sam’s plumes. The look it gave me should have crisped my eyebrows.

“Don’t worry. I haven’t lost the big picture.” I ground out the pill in my saucer. “Okay,” I said. “The Nephilim have been stewing long enough. Let’s do it. Pull the trigger.”

Another flutter, this like the hiss of sizzling rubies. Sam said, “You sure?”

I mulled the angles for a microsecond. What point in a last-minute adjustment? If flametop was lamping the Nephilim, she’d received the telegram I sent courtesy of that dish librarian. Meaning any moment she’d realize she’d been played for a prize sap. And then she’d really hit the roof. I couldn’t do any more without muddying the waters.

No need for corrections. She was right on course.

“I’m sure. Let’s send our girl packing while she’s still spitting nails.”