Blood Of Angels (34 page)

But she kept quiet, and she listened when, after a while, he began to talk. He started slowly, as someone who'd had no audience in a long, long time: no audience except himself.

===OO=OOO=OO===

He had a teacher in high school who said something that evidently stuck. This guy was trying to make a point this one time (later James could never remember what it had been, only that it was a warm afternoon and no one was listening very hard), and he got off on a tangent and said something about how the same difference could represent different types of difference. Though this didn't sound promising — or even intelligible — the words meandered into James's consciousness, and he wound up hearing what the guy asked next.

'Example. What's the difference between two and three?'

There was silence for a while, the fug broken only by the noise of a blowsy fly at the window which ran the side of the classroom.

Someone, a girl, probably, eventually offered the answer 'one'.

'Correct,' the teacher said, nodding briskly. 'Their values differ by one unit, and that's about all there is to say about the matter. But now tell me: what's the difference between one and two?'

And someone, likely the same girl and after a similar interval, said the difference was 'one', again. The teacher nodded once more, but with that jaunty half-smile which said he had something up his sleeve he believed was going to make you think he was cool as all hell, your very own Mr Chips, whereas in fact it just increased your vague desire that he have a coronary, right here, right now.

'Also true,' he said. 'But let's think about that. The difference between two and three just says you've got more of something. Three dollars in your pocket, better than two. Three assignments overdue instead of two — that's worse.' Nobody laughed. One of the girls maybe smiled. Girls are kind. They pretend to be, anyhow. 'It's a unitary difference, and it's a little better, or slightly worse, depending what you're counting. No biggie. Right?'

There was no response. The teacher glanced wearily out the window for a moment, as if counting the years to his retirement and finding them too many. But he ploughed on.

'The step between one and two is bigger news. It's the difference between one and many, between unique and commonplace. If someone says there's two gods, and another guy — or girl, of course — argues that there's three, or five, everyone will remain calm. Polytheists are basically on the same side. But a monotheist runs into a polytheist, it's time to take cover. One true god versus a handful of weird-ass heathen idols? These people have a fundamental disagreement. Fur is going to fly. You're sleeping with one guy, or you're sleeping with two. These differences
matter,
okay? You see what I'm saying?'

Nobody did, at least not sufficiently to vocalize. The fly was still buzzing. It stopped for a while, then started again, in that way they do.

'But then we come to something way more crucial,' the teacher said. 'The difference between zero and one. And again — don't worry, Karla, I'll do the math this time, it's why I get paid the big bucks — superficially we're looking at a difference of one. You've got zero, you add a single unit, so then you've got one. Right?'

James was looking at him now. What the guy was saying was beginning to creep into his head, almost as if James was actually listening. This was a novel experience. It felt compellingly odd.

'But actually,' the teacher said, holding a finger up,
'it isn't one at all.
We say it is, for mathematical convenience, but it really isn't, and that's because we're out of the world of sums now and into what the philosophers call "ontology". You're not talking about numbers any longer, about quantity: you're talking about
quality —
you are saying something about the nature of the world.'

'What?' someone said. 'Saying what?'

'Could be lots of things. Example. The difference between having one kid or twins is not such a big deal…'

'You think?' said one of the girls, indignantly.

'Not in the way I mean,' the teacher said, hurriedly. 'One or two is a matter of degree, and of course it makes a huge difference with costs, and practical considerations, strollers, and stuff… but: pregnant versus not-pregnant,
that's
the real life-changer. It's the difference between being a woman and being a mother. When zero changes to one, that's where the universe flips and life changes. See?'

'Okay,' the girl mumbled, either mollified or falling back asleep.

He pressed the point. 'You get what we're at here, people? The bottom line. There is
a
god, there is
no
god. Existence versus non-existence. Life or death.'

'True or false,' some guy said, quietly.

'Right,
James,' the teacher crowed, delighted, and only then did James realize the speaker had been himself.
'Thank
you — and here was me thinking you were in a coma. Zero, one. On, off. True, false. Something's never happened, then the world is one way; but if it
has
happened, it's another. The step between none and one takes creation and changes it forever.'

James stared back at him, understanding.

And then the bell for end of class went, and everybody split.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The man was silent for a little while then, as if considering the memory. Something about the way he had spoken made Nina think he had not revisited it in quite some time.

'Everyone remembers their first,' he said, eventually. 'Which was Karla. Don't get the idea that I don't like women. I do. Just not very many of them. I get on fine with the ones I like. I had a wife, I had a… I had a wife. It's just it's only once in a great while that a woman does something for me. She has to be very special. It used to bother me that other guys would be looking at a waitress or something and saying how hot she was and I could see her face was okay and she had good tits or ass or whatever they thought was so great about her, but that would be it. It would be like someone offering you a sandwich and you think 'Yes, that bread's nice and fresh, little crusty at the edges, and the fillings look good and are piled high and there's a grind of pepper just to round it off. That's a fine sandwich you've got there. But… I don't want one. It's not that I don't like sandwiches. I do. I just… don't want it.' It's like that. And then you see one you really do want. That you have to have. One with wings. And it always ends up going wrong.'

He breathed out heavily. 'I'm hungry,' he said. 'I'm trying very, very hard. It wouldn't even hurt you, but it would be bad for me to start.'

Nina had no idea what he was talking about. She was badly dehydrated, and concentrating was hard. It was especially hard if you were constantly vigilant for the possibility that he might underline some point by slipping a knife into your skin, or under a fingernail, or into one of your eyes. She had no intention of engaging with his world. She had spent many hours talking to the psychopathic, and if you had a thick wire screen between you it could be fascinating — though most of them wound up heading inexorably down similar tracks, damaged rolling stock shunted towards the same dark and bloody station. Stuck in childhood, believing theirs so much more meaningful than everybody else's. The mechanical tic of recalled injury and slight. Whirling round some momentous event like a rabid dog chained to a post, unable to understand that outside their own heads it was just a past moment of unremarkable time. Inside, the event beats like a psychic heart.

He was quiet for a while longer and then she caught a scent of dry tobacco.

'This is bad enough,' he said, but his voice said he was a man losing a battle. She heard the sound of a match being struck, and then the smell of a cigarette smoked. She didn't mind him doing that. It reminded her of Ward.

Then he was a little closer, and she tensed. He seemed to hesitate, and then his hands were around the back of her head. A quick movement, and the blindfold was off.

It took long seconds for her eyes to adjust, even though the light in the van was very muted. Out front she could see trees. Between them and her, a man. Not young. Big. Sad eyes. But his compassion was for himself, not her.

She blinked and looked around the interior of the van. Sparse, no windows along the sides. A few thin rusty scratches across the inside of the door, short parallel lines. As if someone had once scraped it with their fingernails, while trying desperately to escape.

Maybe even more than once.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Slowly he started talking again, and though he had taken the blindfold off, he never looked anywhere near her eyes. You remembered the last, he said — and faltered a little, as he said it — but most of all you remembered your first. When zero became one. It's like your first beer, or lying beside a girl having done it for the first time — confused, excited, slightly let down: her seeming a little more grown up now, you feeling even younger and smaller than when the evening started. All those nights were anticipated, key battles in the campaign into the foreign hills of maturity. You're not sure where you're going, or why. You just are. Everybody else is too. Alcohol comes first. You come to realize adults drink stuff that you're not supposed to — and the occasional sip you score at home reveals it tastes strange. But that's sort of the point, you gather, and there's something grown-up and delicious about this: you drink this gloop even though it's not too nice? How sophisticated and unchildlike is that! Then suddenly someone at school will make the phylogenetic leap, acing you out by months. There will be quiet, jealous tales told about some party at the weekend, an older boy passing a six-pack around, a boy in your class drinking half of it, not puking, and then kissing a girl…

The kissing part will not be true. Small boys always go one lie too far; big boys too, of course. But the rest of it will be, and the identity of the kid in question will not in the least surprise you.

It will be the Forward-Thinking Boy.

Every class has one. The one who always gets there first, who will forever have left his trash on your mountain top; the one on some fast-track to adulthood, his voice trailing in his wake.

After he's broken the ice it suddenly seems conceivable for the rest of you, and comes the night when you and your buddies are outside a bar and one of them gets away without being carded and you're all suddenly holding these big cold glasses and it's completely different to being allowed a try at a warm bottle out in the garden last summer: and you take a mouthful and it's metallic and foamy and tastes like it might have leaked out of a machine but it's
beer
and you know — as you biliously work your way through a glass that will, in only a few years, disappear in a couple of unthinking swallows — that a box has been ticked.

You have the first of your magic cards. You know the beer spell now.

Overnight you become one of the guys who's had a beer, who chugs it like a fish all the time — Jeez: sometimes you worry you might be turning into a fuckin' juicer, you're drinking so much — though it still tastes soapy and sour, if you're honest, which you're not, because nobody else says anything and you don't want to sound like a pussy, especially now you've proved that you're not.

By now the Forward-Thinking Boy you all want to be acknowledged by (and also slightly fear, and kind of hate) will have leapt whistling over further horizons. He'll regularly smell of cigarettes, or will have weaselled his hand up some pretty girl's shirt — and then, finally, he'll have done
the thing.
The Big One, the World Series of adolescence, the event that carves men from boys, takes the doers and takers and puts them in the VIP enclosure of adolescence: fenced off by experience, lustrous with action, immediately taller and cooler in a way you will never, ever feel, regardless of what you do in the rest of your life.

But you do not understand that, not yet, and this is a time of credits which have to be earned. So you will try cigarettes one afternoon, and hate them, or not, little realizing this small difference will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, countless coffee breaks standing in the cold and rain with your fellow pariahs, and finally your life. And eventually, under one circumstance or another, your hand will cup the surprising warmth and softness of a breast, disbelievingly, as if you have been allowed against all odds to pet some small, bald, mythical creature, in its nest. You're not sure what to do next — there doesn't seem to be a self-evidently logical next step — but it's done. And finally you will screw, and it will be embarrassing, but it will be over quickly and you will be ejected out the other side into a land where there is little left to do, all but two of life's major boxes already ticked.

Sooner or later you will start drawing new boxes for yourself, as a way to fill the time: and they may be sketchy and on show to all — big car, big house, big job — or small and intimately detailed and kept largely out of sight. The hand that draws those boxes will look like it's yours, but it will be much younger. It will be the hand that held the first cigarette, the hand placed on that first breast by a girl who was growing cold and bored and would have preferred you to be someone else. It is the hand that pulls the sheets up to your chin when you go to bed in your parents' house at the end of the night when you have first had sex; lying in bed as the planet turns, knowing the world is different now and wondering why it feels so much the same, whether you perhaps did something wrong, or
not quite right —
wondering why the idea of it felt so much more momentous than the actuality turned out to be.

The hand is the key. When you look at someone's hand, look carefully and long, you see everything they are and have been and done. Hands are action. Hands are doing. When you take someone's hand you own them entire.

Just as holding that first cigarette can be a life sentence, so can the other thing. You liked it well enough that first time, but felt you didn't really get to the bottom of it. That there must be
more
to be had, something that will bring the reality in line with the idea; that will align the world outside your head with the way it is inside.