Falling Idols (29 page)

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.