Vellum (11 page)

three

ALL ETERNITY OR NOTHING

A Vague but Passionate Way

A
sheville, July 13th, 2017.

Thomas watches the blond frat boy sit his glass down on the table so he can use his hand to argue with a crow-haired friend—who shakes his head, sneering. He watches the wild gestures of that cutest member of the frat pack; there's six or seven of them, all crew-cut and clean-shaven, mostly decked out in the red-white-and-blue of their trendy logoed togs so out of place in this college town bar with its foreign beers and alt-rock ambience. The only ones who look at all like they belong here, in their leather jackets and boot-cut jeans, are that lion of a golden boy and the one he's arguing with; the rest are square to the hair, the legal eagles and football bulls of the future. They're arguing about the war, it sounds like, the golden boy—the delicious closet case with the sideways glance—going on about freedom and democracy in a vague but passionate way that Thomas finds dumbly endearing. It's at least a little better than the ones who're using words like
sand-nigger.
Jack, his friends call him.

He darts another glance at Thomas again, losing his train of thought apparently and finishing his bluster with a wave of his hand. Thomas keeps his eyes on him as he looks away again just as quickly.

You know you fucking want it.

“You've got to be fucking crazy,” says Finnan. “This has the stink of demon all over it. Honest-to-God, bona fide, ‘kill your own soul rather than let the Covenant have it' demons. Sovereigns. Jesus, the fuckers who think of themselves as angels aren't bad enough for you?”

“All I want is a way out,” says Thomas.

He's still watching the frat boy.

“You think the Vellum is a way out? It's not an escape. It's fucking death.”

Thomas turns back to his friend.

“No. Death is
this
world. Death is a suicide bomber on a bus. It's a car on the road going too fast. It's that poor, gorgeous bastard over there getting old and fat and dropping dead from a heart attack in his fifties. Death is reality and if the Vellum is anything, it's what…it's what starts where reality ends. You told me that yourself.”

“Well, maybe I was talking shite.”

Thomas notices that Finnan's accent kicks in when he's pissed—pissed-angry or pissed-drunk, it doesn't make much difference—and he wonders again just what the Irishman's story is. Seamus Finnan. Where do you really come from?
When
do you really come from?

He fidgets with a beermat.

“Come on. You're the fucking original dropout, angel-eyes. Huckleberry Finnan. Man, I thought you'd be with me on this one. You and me, Butch and Sundance, we could—”

“Shite. Will ye just fookin listen to me for fookin once, Tommy? Tom. Yer fookin twenty-odd years old and ye think ye know what death is. Yer barely graved and ye think ye know what the Vellum is. This isn't a fookin game. It's not some fookin doorway into Never-Neverland that we're talking about here.”

Thomas runs a finger over a gouge that cuts across the grained surface of the table. He thinks of the tree it was made from, its trunk of capillaries drawing water and minerals up along them, streams of…time all arranged as a thin skin round the inner rings of dead matter. Like the Vellum, their world just one stream. He's been cutting across from stream to stream these last few years, up and down, and side to side, looking for a way to get out of it entirely, to dig his way out onto the surface of it, or in, into the quiet, solid wood. Neverland? He smiles.

“Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”

Finnan says nothing for a while.

“OK,” says Thomas. “OK, I'm sorry. I know this isn't a game. Fuck it, Finnan, I wouldn't be living out of motel rooms and hopping freight trains between decades if I didn't know it was serious. I'm not dumb. The thing is…what other choice is there?”

Thomas has been on the run now for nearly two years, hasn't seen his sister or the folks for that long. It's not so hard roughing it when you're what Finnan calls
unkin,
not as hard as it would be otherwise; there are plenty of…tricks you can use. He takes a sip of the beer he paid for with a smile and looks past Finnan at the blond frat boy. And there are plenty of tricks you can use.

But, still, he wouldn't be running at all if there wasn't good reason.

“Do we just keep running forever, Finnan? I mean, do we? You've heard about the weird shit going on in Jerusalem. And we've got a fucking fundamentalist in the White House who's obviously a Covenant man, whether he knows it or not. How long before the whole shithouse goes up in flames?”

“I don't know,” says Finnan.

“How long?”

“I don't know.”

Destination Apocalypse

Thomas picks up the business card lying on the table between them and starts turning it between his fingers like a magician playing with a coin. He turns it up and out to face Finnan, who slumps back into the red faux-leather of the booth, shaking his head. All it has are a name, a logo and an address—no phone, no email, no link. It's not even smart, just printed white card, like something from the last century. But then—Thomas looks around—the whole fucking city of Asheville is an anachronism. Not that that's a bad thing. It's in these kinds of places that it's easiest to step across from one time to another, following the flow of similitudes, the folds of commonalities.

Like airports, he thinks. You go from one transfer lounge to another and you look around you and, if it wasn't for the plane ride, you wouldn't know you'd gone anywhere. Thomas has walked into a john in George Bush International in Texas and come out of another in Mexico City. And out on the back roads through these sticks of states, the desert roads, mountain roads, you can step across whole decades. He managed to spend last summer hiding out in 1970, moving from commune to commune, May through July; only reason he's back now is to see Finnan and his little sister Phree one last time before he takes that last big step…sideways. You can skip up and down the railroad track as much as you want, back and forth, back and forth. Pick a year, any year. At the end of the day, there's still a freight train coming that'll either run right over you or pick you up and slam you all the way to the terminus. Destination Apocalypse. Better to get off the track entirely.

“Madame Iris Tattoos,” says Finnan. “You don't have a fucking clue what you're dealing with, Tom.”

Thomas lays the card down on the table. The logo is a black, stylized eye, radiating lines and curves, like the eye in the pyramid on a dollar bill, like the Eye of Horus used on all the New Age head shops around here…and quite different from either.

It fucking screams unkin. He can hear it in the bones of his fingers where he touches it, the way it resonates inside him, simpatico with his soul. Thomas is one of them, you see, unkin. One of what they call angels, or demons, or gods. The birdmen who sing the morning world into existence with their Cant. He found it out three years back and he's been running ever since.

“So are you born unkin or made unkin?” he asked Finnan one night, before he was sure about himself, when he could just feel something tingling in his bones. A sense of something. They were on peyote, the two of them, out in the desert outside Slab City, and the world seemed like a dream that he was suddenly lucid in.

“Fucked if I know, Tom,” Finnan had said. “I'm not sure it's either. Maybe it's a bit of both.”

He wonders if it was chance, meeting this crazy hermit in his ramshackle cave of junk with his young face and old eyes, or if Finnan somehow found him, somehow knew before he knew himself and was just waiting for Thomas to realize what he was. Looking out for him in the meantime, while the Covenant angels and their enemies walked the earth, gathering their armies.

“This is our way out,” he says. “Away from the whole fucking bullshit war. Into the Vellum. It's all or nothing, he says. All eternity or nothing.”

“bullshit war?”

The frat boy's voice isn't loud enough for him to make out the whole sentence, but the tone of it and the stares in their direction carry more than enough information, more than enough threat. Thomas waits for the crow-haired hawk to calm his fuckwit fascist bull of a buddy—the queer lion just sits there of course, avoiding all the confrontations, external or internal, that might arise from any actual action. He wouldn't want people to think…whatever. Thomas waits until the bull is soothed—
leave it, man, leave it—
and they've turned back to bludgeoning each other with their blunt opinions, then leans over to Finnan, speaking quieter now, serious.

“We don't belong here, Finnan. None of us do. And we all know it; we all feel it. We get that graving cut into us, burned into us, we get a little glimpse of what's out there and, you know, from then on, we can't get it out of our heads.”

Thomas became unkin at the age of nineteen, wasted on peyote out in the Mojave desert, saw eternity in a grain of sand, and didn't like what he saw, a vast and ancient power moving under the world around them, like muscles under the smooth skin of some slouching panther. Not God but something older, something colder. A glimpse of scales and feathers.

Finnan finishes his beer and peels a twenty out of his pocket, drops it on the table to cover their tab, stands up.

“God help you, Tommy boy. You don't know what you're doing. God help you.”

“Which one?” says Thomas.

But as they say their goodbyes and Finnan walks away and pushes his way out through the door and into sunlight, as Thomas sits back down to finish off his beer and eye up the blond frat boy over at the other table, he thinks to himself that he knows—he
does
know—that he's playing with fire.

But there's a whole Vellum out there to hide in.

He checks the clock behind the bar—he doesn't wear a watch himself these days, not much point the way he lives. It's 5:45 or so. Where to, he thinks, where to?

Pick a year, any year.

The Voice of God

The Voice of God has a name—Metatron—but it's a made-up name, a chosen name; it's not the name he was born with and it's not even the first name that he's taken since abandoning the one his mother and father gave to him, back when he was still human. Needless to say, it's not the name on the passport that he hands over to the painted china doll of a woman at the check-in of the KLM flight from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, to Newark, or at customs and immigration, or the transfer desk in New York; on the passport, he's Enoch Hunter, a solid, straightforward name that's not going to raise any eyebrows. Traveling to the States as Enki Nudimmud, in this day and age, would be just plain foolish. Slipping through the cracks in reality requires subtlety; and given the…situation in the Middle East, the last thing he wants is to draw attention to his origins. It would be ironic if the very architect of the new crusade was detained under the Homeland Defense Act for “motivational profiling,” as they call it. He could beat the lie detectors and the truth drugs, but it would waste his time, and he would be tempted just to tell them everything.

“You want to know the truth?” he might say. “You
really
want to know the truth about your war on terror?”

And then he'd whisper one word and they'd see it all, the Dead Soul Deeps and the demon Sovereigns walking in the shape of men, angels begging for their lives on Al Jazheera. And Malik in Damascus, at the heart of it all, graving Shariah law and hatred of the West into his followers. The real Cant under all the rhetoric.

Charlotte, July 13th, 2017, 11:45 a.m. Six hours before the Messenger boy and the Irishman will meet.

He takes the passport back from the guard, nods and smiles at him as he leans forward, putting his eye to the retina-scanner and his thumb to the sampler. The guard runs his gloved fingers over a nonexistent keyboard, and stares through him for a second as data scrolls across his lenses; Metatron watches it like a reflection in the man's pupils, little arcane flickerings of light drawn out of a distant database—birth and citizenship certificates, criminal record query, tax records. It all pans out as tidy and safe, as it should. Enoch Hunter is an African-American, unmarried, a professor at the University of North Carolina, based at the Asheville campus, specializing in anthropology and archeosociology, a taxpayer and an honest citizen. Metatron puts the passport in the inside pocket of his long black leather duster, flicks back his dreads and gives the man a
You too
in reply to his
Have a nice day.

It's not that the passport is forged. It's not that Enoch Hunter doesn't actually exist. The identity is a construct but it's an airtight, solid-as-mahogany one. Here and now, at this exact point of time and space, in this little corner of the Vellum, Enoch Hunter is as real as the guard, with the same memories of childhood and adulthood, in his head or in other people's, the same tracks and traces left in the world around him, among his friends and family, as any human leaves in his path. Metatron remembers his lecture at the conference in Paris. He remembers laughing in the seafood restaurant as he dined with colleagues. It's just that all this is temporary. Even as he walks out through the silent slide of automatic doors that open out into the North Carolina sunshine, Enoch Hunter dissolves back into the field of possibility that he came from, forgotten as quickly as he was created. As Metatron takes the small black leatherbound palmtop out of his pocket and flips it open, Enoch Hunter ceases to have ever existed and reality slides back to where it was and should be. There was no conference in Paris now. The KLM flight from Schiphol to Newark, the Northwestern flight from Newark to Charlotte—neither have any record of an Enoch Hunter traveling in business class.