8

JUST BE GLAD IT WASN’T A TUBA

The light hurt worse than getting sliced apart by any tram. And knowing what she’d done to Ria hurt even worse than the light. Molly tried to scream, but she was caught like a bug in amber too thick for the faintest exhalation. Yet she couldn’t flail and couldn’t struggle because there was nothing to push against. Something had erased Heaven and Earth, leaving in their place only pain.

Molly returned to consciousness through a vague awareness the pain had receded. But there was no sensation of the passage of time; time did not exist, neither did a reality against which to measure it. Something had erased the pain, leaving in its place … nothing. Her incorporeal awareness inhabited a formless void, a solipsistic universe. The Pleroma, if this was the Pleroma, had been rebooted.

She didn’t come to her senses in comfortable, familiar surroundings. She couldn’t. Her Magisterium had been deleted. Her sense of self, her identity, her connection to her earthly life, her imprint on the universe … gone.

This was a punishment. She’d broken the rules. Whatever those were.

What had Bayliss said about laying low? Maybe she should have listened. Maybe she would have, if he’d bothered to explain the rules to her.

Was Bayliss still around? Shit, did Earth still exist? Or had that been wiped out, too? And what about Martin? And—

Ria.

Oh, fucking hell. Ria.

The memory hit like a lightning bolt. Molly’s mind crackled. If she’d had a body, the fiery intensity of her shame would have incinerated it.

But she had no mouth with which to scream, no Magisterium to echo with her sorrow. She had no eyes with which to weep, no pocket of reality where gravity could clutch at her tears. Molly’s anguish could have no outlet until she built one.

That, she realized, was her true punishment.

*   *   *

After reestablishing the fuzziest approximation of matter and energy and objective persistence (as well as time, to provide a sense of “after”) Molly recovered her consciousness in the bedroom of a hastily sketched semblance of her kaleidoscope Magisterium.

Tears of blood crusted her face. On her way to the ghostly bathroom, she tripped over the sensation of being sneezed upon by a sick horse. She scrubbed her face, her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids. Flakes of scabbed blood fell into her eyes when she washed her face. They scratched and pinched, then melted into long crimson smears along her eyeballs. She pinched the bridge of her nose until her tears ran pink. In the mirror she watched a thin red trickle leaking from the corner of her eye—

Blood streaming from Ria’s nose, piss staining her pants …

A violent spasm wracked Molly. She hit all fours and vomited foggy moonlight. Where it splashed against the bathroom tiles, her puke jangled like fistfuls of silverware flung against a gong. It tasted like the stale air inside a bicycle inner tube, and carried chunks of a shattered bike pedal. Her stomach convulsed until her face ran wet with tears and snot, and streamers of foggy spittle dangled from her lips.

When the spasms subsided, she hauled herself to the edge of the bathtub and wept. These tears burned. But they couldn’t cleanse the guilt that clung to Molly like a sheen of oil. She had lobotomized the woman she’d loved, and maybe even still loved. She’d turned one of the people whom she held most dear into a shuddering, mindless, pants-wetting vegetable. Ria would never listen to another Édith Piaf song, never again tell anybody that spinach tasted like ass, never haul another wheelbarrow of poisoned lake bed.

Molly couldn’t even say she was sorry. Couldn’t ask for forgiveness. So she wept until the tears ran dry.

Then, on top of everything else, she’d been assaulted again. It had felt as though it were directed at her, this perfect Platonic anger.

She had one option, and she hated herself for considering it. But she called Bayliss anyway.

It rang thirty-two times on the first attempt. She hung up, redialed, listened to another nineteen rings. Bayliss was ignoring her, or too drunk to answer, or dead. Maybe whatever he’d been running from, the thing that had him so terrified, had finally caught up to him. She didn’t relish the thought of being stuck in eternity without a tour guide. Even one as obnoxious as Bayliss. Eternity was a big place.

He’d mentioned a Choir, by which he seemed to be referring to all the angels. It sounded like there were many. Maybe there was a way to encounter them, learn from them, foster a relationship. Maybe they weren’t all as bad as Bayliss. But maybe they were worse. Maybe they all had invisible wings and faces of fire and voices appropriate for narrating the end of the world.

Molly put the notion aside. She was on her own.

And first things first: she refused to live in a diaphanous trash heap. It would take forever to re-create and reassimilate the fragments of memory debris, but then again, she had eternity. And the process would keep her rooted in her human life. She didn’t want to lose that. No matter what, she didn’t want to become something else. If she drifted away she might forget about Ria and Martin, might lose the connection, might lose the drive to help them and heal them. She had to cling to whatever part of herself was still human. Wasn’t she still human at heart?

The bedroom floorboards lay under a synesthetic puddle, the soapy taste of wind rustling a field of lavender mixed with just a hint of the tingly smell of her father’s stubble when he kissed her on the forehead. She stepped into the field, felt the sunlight on her skin, and remembered. She’d been riding in the car with Dad, back when they had lived in Alberta, and they were bumping down back roads the way he always liked to do, just to see what he could see. They came around a bend to suddenly face a vast field of purple. She had been sixteen and hadn’t said anything to him all day because she was sixteen and hated everybody. She scowled when he parked and got out. But she followed, and when a breeze came swirling through the field, the world smelled of lavender soap. On the way home she told him she was a lesbian and fuck him if he didn’t like it, and without any pause he said, “Okay, but can I still be your dad?” and that was that. Molly spent the rest of the ride home with her head on his shoulder, telling him about a girl at school. Mom did pretty well with the news, but not as good as Dad.

It had been a good day. Too valuable to lose. But that wasn’t the memory in her head. The memory in her head was a barren hole where this slice of her teenage life had been. A torn blank canvas where one of the best memories of her father had been. She knew the memory because it was spread about her feet, the sights and smells and feelings of that day swirling together like the colors on an oily parking lot puddle just after a rainstorm.

Molly considered the implications. She searched the rest of her memory.

It was shredded.

Not her embryonic Magisterium, which had been filled with memory debris by the Cherubic assault, erased by an enraged light that shook the heavens, and then revived in a half-assed resurrection. But her memory, her actual in-her-mind memory, was a barren landscape pocked with craters and steaming fissures. She remembered recent stuff, stuff about Ria, because re-creating the Minneapolis apartment had been, in her own way, Molly’s paean to something she wanted to keep alive. It still surrounded Molly, even if it was broken and twisted. But everything else—the debris, the disconnected memories shaken loose by the Cherubim—cluttered her Magisterium rather than her mind.

She fixated on the memory of the lavender field. Concentrating on that afternoon with her father, she turned and approached the bathroom. Her feet left puddles of memory on the floorboards. She closed the bathroom door, still concentrating on … something about Dad. Something about … a flower? Or maybe Mom? A vague sense of importance …

It came back to her when she returned to the bedroom and stood in the midst of the puddle, where the memory had melted and run together like the clocks in a Salvador Dalí painting. But it did not reside within her head. Those motherfuckers had stolen the day she came out to her father.

Well, those flaming assholes could eat shit. The Cherubim weren’t going to ruin this. Molly wouldn’t let them.

She imagined herself as an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Just a border and a few small patches, the rest of the picture a vast emptiness. This memory was one piece of herself. And when she stood inside the memory, relived it, she knew exactly where it went. It slotted into place. She recovered a piece of her sixteenth year. Another memory was stuck to it, like puzzle pieces jammed together when the box is shaken too hard. She pulled it apart, and put the brown mucus of a wet horse sneeze where it belonged with her sixth-grade memories. Another fragment of herself recovered.

Some recollections were harder than others. Harder to endure, to experience, to place. Some things she didn’t want to remember, like the time she’d found Martin lying on the floor of his apartment with a needle in his arm, his breath so shallow and pulse so thready she thought for certain he was dead. But she kept them all. They were her; she was the sum of this debris.

She was sweating and panting by the time she’d cleared the bedroom and bathroom. But with the exception of Bayliss’s cigarette stain on the floorboard, they were back to the way they were meant to be.

Things got easier as she filled more of the missing gaps in herself. She cleared out the jumble of concepts where the stairwell had been, and worked her way through the disaster zone downstairs. Along the way she shored up the Magisterium itself, filled the gauzy ghostly patches with lath and loss, plaster and pride.

Molly took a break after she found the memory of eating Italian ice crammed under the sofa cushions. It had been a hot autumn day, but the artificial-pomegranate-flavored ice numbed her tongue while the glass-bottomed tour boat hovered above the ruins of Venice. She recognized the sticky sensation of sugar syrup dripping down her fingers while the ice melted. The memory ice tasted only faintly of real fruit. But it soothed her and carried no associations with Ria. She let the rocking of the boat relax her.

She was just on the verge of dozing off when the memory shifted. A faint hollow tapping overlaid the murmur of the other tourists and the whirr of the solar boat engine. Tickety-tick, it went. Click-click-clickety-click. Like a fingernail flicked against a windowpane. When she opened her eyes, the memory resumed as normal, with tourists taking photos of the ruins through the glass hull. Nobody noticed the shadow hovering beneath the boat like a loitering merman. She frowned.

“Hey, flametop,” said a voice like somebody gargling. “You gonna wake up any time soon?”

One glass pane along the boat’s keel had become a window into a shabby apartment building. Bayliss sat in the shadows beside a chessboard, pipe in one hand. He rapped the pipe stem against the pane again.

Molly sighed. She filed the Venice memory in its proper place before returning to her Magisterium. She made to open the door for Bayliss, but he whistled from behind her in the living room.

“Ain’t you a stubborn one. I’d figured these digs for a lost cause once the loogans had their way with it. And that was before … Well, I guess you had to start over like the rest of us. But there’s more to you than attitude and looks. Right?”

Molly wheeled on him. “Where the hell have you—”

Bruises mottled his face. His left eye was black, the other swollen halfway shut. “Jesus. What happened to you?”

“What, these love taps?” He gestured at his face with the pipe. “Mementoes from a couple admirers. I found your guys.” He shrugged. “We had a chat.”

“Damn.” She sat on the sofa armrest. The Cherubim had really worked him over. He looked like he’d lost a bar brawl with a prizefighter. Bayliss could be annoying, but holy shit—he’d gone and confronted those bastards on her behalf. He hadn’t needed to do that. Huh.

“Do you want some ice or something?” She gestured, awkwardly, toward where the kitchen should have been. It wouldn’t be that hard to put an ice maker in the fridge. “Your face is really puffy.”

“Nah. It’s jake. Flo’s got a raw T-bone set aside for me.” He took a chair.

“Okay. Well. Thanks for finding those sons of bitches.” Bayliss brushed off the thanks with an irritated wave of the pipe. She asked, “I don’t suppose they told you what they wanted with me?”

“Not in so many words. But yeah, I got the headlines.”

He lit a match on his thumbnail. He tried to light his pipe, but Molly patched the memory of a ceiling fan into her Magisterium. It blew out his match. His eyes followed the wisps of smoke from the extinguished match up to where the fan shredded them into invisible streamers of soot. His eyes, those old, old eyes, narrowed.

“Cute dido. Guess you’re a real smooth operator, aren’t you.”

“I’m getting a lot of practice trying to put this place back together.” Thinking back to the searing light that burned away her Magisterium, she said, “And speaking of which, what the shit was with the light and that voice—”

“Yeah, let’s not drop that nickel just yet. I don’t want to talk about METATRON. Let’s talk about you.” Bayliss stowed the matches back inside his coat. “I think you’re being modest.”

Molly blinked, shook her head. His body language and tone of voice belied the gentle words. She reminded herself that he’d just had the crap beaten out of him, and on her behalf. He was entitled to some irritation. On the other hand, it wasn’t difficult to glimpse the accusation peeking through the curtain of his words.

“Did you go off your meds or something? You’re acting very weird. I mean, even weirder than normal.”

“Why are you beefing me, lady? You’re the one had me down for a pigeon.”

“I wish just once you would talk like a normal person.”

“Oh, come on. Drop the veil, doll. You know what I’m getting at.”

“I haven’t yet known what you were getting at. Not ever.”

“Hey, I know I got a front-row seat to the highlight reel, but remind me. Your parents, they religious types? Take you to church a lot when you were a kid?”

And now he was changing the subject. Maybe the beating had given him brain damage. Did he have a brain? Or even a body, for that matter? “Not much. What’s this about?”

Bayliss shrugged. “Just wondering if you happen to know a Father Santorelli, up Chicago-way.”

“I’ve never been to Chicago.”

“No kidding? Huh.”

“Seriously, Bayliss. Just out with it.”

“Well, see, there’s one thing I just can’t figure. Could’ve sworn I got a real good look at your life when you were under that train. Meaning somebody went to a lot of effort kicking leaves over the embarrassing bits.”

He shook out a cigarette, lit it. Molly cranked up the speed on the ceiling fan. Bayliss drew deep; the tip of his cigarette flared nova bright. Tendrils of smoke snaked up, coiled around the fan blades, wrenched them still. The fan motor died with a screech and clank. The smells of ozone, hot metal, and oil filled the room. Jerk.

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” she said. “What did I do wrong now?”

The cherry on his cigarette flared brighter and burned all the way down the length of the paper, leaving a wispy ash trail in the wake of one impossibly long inhalation. Smoke leaked from his nose, eyes, pores. It wreathed his head like a halo.

“Okay, I get it. What a gag!” He laughed. “Yep. There’s egg all over old Bayliss’s face, no fooling. But it’s run its course.” He got serious again. “Who are you?”

“Molly Pruett. Not that you care, because you never call me by name.”

“I didn’t ask your name. I asked who you are,” said Bayliss. “Because I think you’re the kind of bird who isn’t what she seems. And I’m tired of always playing the sap.”

And then he launched into a diatribe featuring Gabriel’s Magisterium, the Cherubim (did they really use brass knuckles?), a dead priest, Plenary Indulgences (whatever those were), and something about a trumpet. And, according to Bayliss, it was all connected directly to Molly via the murdered angel.

She didn’t believe him. So he showed her the memory fragment and then there she was, in the old house with the orange tree, crouched outside her parents’ bedroom, straining to make out the whispers—

Whoa.

“Hey, just hold on. This is crazy.”

But he’d built up momentum and wasn’t yet finished. “But then, on top of the rest, just as things were getting interesting with the Cherubim, somebody decided to go ahead and rouse METATRON.” He paused to light another cigarette. The smoke was so thick that the back of her throat tasted like the ceiling of a cheap bar. She stopped breathing. “But hey, we all remember our first time. So tell me, Molly Pruett. Where were you when the Voice of God decided to practice the do-re-mis?”

Voice of God? Is that what that was? Well, crap.

She told him about Ria. It took a force of will not to sick up again, but damned if she’d show Bayliss the tiniest sniffle. He cradled his head in his hands while she recounted the events in Minneapolis. Then he sighed.

“So you KO’d the chippie. What happened next?”

“Don’t you dare call her that.” Molly drew a shuddery breath. “Her name was Ria. And I tried to save her. You’d said something about angels and time, so I tried to nudge it backward a couple of minutes. It was working, too, but then the light came.”

He smoked the entire cigarette down to wisps of vapor before speaking again. “You tried to violate causality. You tried to jackhammer through the bedrock of the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. And unlike me, METATRON doesn’t have a sense of humor about these things.” More smoke fumed from his collar. “That’s what METATRON does. It patrols the MOC for juvenile delinquents like you.” His fingernails rapped a fast tattoo on the armrest of his chair. “I can’t help but wonder how a freshly hatched cluck like you could possibly have the juice to goose METATRON.”

Molly shook her head. “I loved her,” she said. Her voice broke. “I loved Ria so much.”

No afterlife, no reunions …

“Tough break, kid. But enough with the sad sack. Because for the record? We all felt it. The Voice of God doesn’t do private concerts. So thanks to you, Thrones and Virtues and Dominions all over the Pleroma are rebuilding their Magisteria for the first time in eons. It’s like Habitat for Divinity out there.”

Shit. She’d thought it was just her. But … Somewhere deep in her gut, a cold watery slosh caused her to clench up. What if the Cherubim came back? Were there worse angels than those two? How many enemies had she made?

Bayliss said, “What part of ’don’t rock the boat’ is so difficult for you to understand? Don’t you see? They’ll be watching us now. It’s curtains for both of us if they lose their patience.”

Fear and nausea dampened her forehead with cool sweat. It trickled from her armpits, too. “Who?”

“Everybody. Every Chorus in the Choir. And as sure as I know how to pick the ponies, I know they’ll be gunning for that Trumpet. And where do you think they’ll start?” He pointed at her chest. “They’ve got a bone to pick, angel.”

Molly lay on the floor. Ripples of rancid-tasting candlelight spread across the floor, flushing dust bunnies and family Thanksgivings from dark corners. She pressed one hand to her stomach, the other to her forehead. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned something about a trumpet.”

“Not just any trumpet. Holy smokes, don’t you ever listen? The Jericho Trumpet. Not some tarnished, dented lowbrow swag from the high school marching band.”

“Whatever. Why do these jackholes think I have it?”

“Because Gabriel was its appointed guardian. And you showed up just after he punched out. You’re the understudy. So of course they assume you’ve nabbed it. But they don’t know you like I do. Once they come to realize you’re just some screwy dame, they’ll lay off. Eventually.”

“Why would I even want some piece of shit horn anyway? I’d never heard of it until you mentioned it. Plus I couldn’t play the thing if I wanted to.”

“The Jericho Trumpet isn’t something for tooting. It’s the tuning fork for Creation. It’s the note the lead violin plays right before the symphony starts. But it’s also a tool of righteous fury. You think it’s unpleasant when METATRON sings a cappella? Wait’ll you hear that voice coming through the Trumpet. Just make sure I’m on the other side of the observable universe when that happens.”

“So why are they looking for it? If the other angels can already do just about anything they want, subject to the MOC, what use is it to them?”

“Who said anything about using it? Jickity, even Gabriel treated that thing with kid gloves. Don’t know that he ever dared touch it to his lips. Nor his beak, nor either of his muzzles, for that matter.”

Molly couldn’t begin to picture what Bayliss meant by that. She didn’t want to. “So…”

“Look. Remember that time just after you got your learner’s permit, and you took your mom’s car out for a spin and dinged up the paint? Remember how that went when she got home?”

“Keep out of my memories.”

He plucked a spiky fragment from between the cushions. “Then keep your memories out of my chair.” He flicked it at her, continuing, “In Gabby’s absence, we all share the responsibility of safeguarding the Trumpet. So if Mom and Dad come home to find it missing … On the other mitt, whoever turns it in scores a few points with METATRON. I can think of worse things than being owed a favor. Folks around here know a rare opportunity when they see one.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Molly.

“I can’t believe you’ve cooked up such a jam,” said Bayliss. “And so quickly.”

This was insane. Somehow, the moment he’d shoved her under the tram was just the beginning of her troubles. He wouldn’t come out and say it, but Molly could tell Bayliss was worried sick. Things were spiraling out of control. Cosmically out of control. Somebody killed Gabriel—and what the hell did that even mean?—and then stole his shit, all of which had nothing to do with her until Bayliss dragged her into the middle of it. And then he couldn’t even be bothered to explain things to her properly. So when she did try to do something, it just made things worse. She’d destroyed Ria because of Bayliss. More disgusting still was the fact this had been the second time she turned to him for help. That was two times too many.

In their final argument, Ria had said she was ending the relationship because she needed to be with somebody more her equal. More independent. Somebody who wasn’t so damned deferential. Molly always let Ria call the shots, not knowing how it undermined their relationship until it was too late.

Very well. She’d take charge. And Bayliss could go fuck himself if he didn’t like it.

She needed to start moving. She needed to put mass on the problem, as Martin liked to say. And she needed to make sure that Trumpet turned up before they came for her again.

She’d find it with or without Bayliss’s help.

Molly climbed to her feet. “We need to get to work.”

“Look,” said Bayliss. “We’re sitting on dynamite here. A smart little dish would skip out until things cool—”

“Give me the list of Plenary Indulgence recipients.”

Bayliss blinked. “Come again?”

“The other people Gabriel was watching. If Father Santorelli was worked up over the Indulgences, odds are they were recipients. Give me the list. I’ll check them out. And maybe I can figure out why he connected me to that bunch.”

Bayliss pulled out another cigarette. He tapped it on the armrest, spun it around his fingers, stuck it behind his ear. He sounded bemused. “Huh. Never thought of that.”

“Isn’t it kind of obvious?” she asked.

“It is possible that on rare occasions somebody might think of something I didn’t. Try not to looked so shocked, you’re letting the flies in. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to be bracing our leads. We can’t afford it if they all pop a vein in the brain.”

Molly ground her teeth, thinking of Ria. She said, “I gather I’m not very popular right now. And don’t pretend you’re not pissing yourself for fear it’ll rub off on you. It makes the most sense for me to follow the leads on Earth while you keep an eye on things in the Pleroma.”

He stared at her. She had to turn away from the look in his eyes.

“Maybe you’re not so screwy after all, angel. This could work. You head on down to the old stomping grounds and try to figure out what had Gabby and Santorelli so keen to shadow the mooks on this list. I’ll stick around up here and try to put a blanket on it.”

He fished out his wallet and produced a diaphanous tissue of shimmering memories. It was folded like an origami crane. The bird became a flock when he tossed it at her. The memories unfolded, settling over her arms and shoulders like hungry sparrows.

“We’re in this together, me and you. Yeah, I’m not thrilled about it, either. But this’ll go better if we back each other instead of turning over at the first sign of trouble.”

Molly rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

“Gosh, that’s reassuring. This partnership will be one for the record books, I can tell already. But promise you’ll go easy. You still need practice.”

“Then it’s past time I had some. I’ll find a way to interact without hurting them.” The last words lodged in her throat and came out as a whisper.

And once I figure out how to do that, I can talk to Martin. And eventually, I’ll figure out how to heal Ria. I’ll heal them both, or I’ll tear the whole goddamned system down in the attempt.