Falling Idols (34 page)

“The people in Miracle are no longer even aware this is here,” Memuneh said. “Austin knows, but would never tell them.”

She nodded. It was just as well.

“I only wanted to bring them light,” he said, “and hold those who needed it when it was dark for them. I believed that I brought enough light for all of them, but there were so many who wanted to possess it. Light. How can light be possessed?”

He told her then that he’d watched them kill over it. Not publicly, but in secret, at night. He admitted that there had to have been more behind it than what he witnessed, but four of those who already lived here had driven three new arrivals into the desert, far past the other side of town. Graves had already been dug, and to keep the murders from being given away by the sound of distant gunfire, they were committed with a shovel and a pick-axe. “‘It’s
our
angel,’” Memuneh told her one of them had said, “‘not yours.’” He’d not shown himself in Miracle since that night.

She felt sickened. “You … you couldn’t stop it?”

“Stop it?”

“Just the sight of you would’ve done it — don’t you think? God!”

Memuneh stared, tender face suddenly alien to her, seemingly amazed that she could even suggest such a thing.

“It was only their bodies dying.
They
did not. Bodies always die. Why would I stop something so natural? I comfort suffering and remove it if I can, but death? There
is
no stopping that. Death is its own law.”

Then why, she demanded, had he let the murders drive him into seclusion? Why abandon the rest and douse that precious light he’d been so eager to bring? Why sit on his ass in the desert and wait for Austin to come along and finding him crying over it?

Because their eyes were all so weak, he explained, they could hardly see a thing. Even in his presence, he’d realized, they saw nothing but the few years of their own tiny lives.

“And that was a surprise to you?” Gabrielle said.

“Why I might come here? They thought it was for them alone.” He pointed to the petroglyphs, three of the more ghostly figures, the highest off the ground at a dozen feet and among the oldest, he’d said. They were like none of the others, the three bodies long and bladelike, tapering to points. Each dangled one arm at its side and held the other straight out, trailing something the neolithic artist had depicted as thin streamers; from the same arm an arc swept up and overhead and down the other side, like a corona or a single vast wing.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “The one on the left was me.”

Soon, on the return hike, he did most of the talking.

*

“There are no angels and no devils, not as you believe in them … those of you who believe at all. There are only the Kyyth, and how you see us.

“We shared your birth as a separate species and have walked alongside you ever since, only rarely making ourselves known for what we actually are. Some of us choose to play to your expectations. Some choose to confound them.

“But it is for you that we exist, and for no other reason. We exist so that you become what you were meant to be.

“We began as thoughts in the mind of what you have named God, and Allah, and Brahma, and Ialdabaoth, and Ahura Mazda, and all the other names. We fell from that mind into independence so we could remain here. Because then we were all that was left of what some of you much later named Deus Absconditus — the God Who Went Away…”

*

Late that afternoon he sensed Gabrielle returning before she came into view, and waited for her out behind the shack. She was alone, Memuneh having accompanied her only so far, then turning around again.

She stuck her head beneath the faucet and he levered up a cooling gusher over her neck and scalp. As she stood dripping, the water soaking into already sweaty clothes, she’d look at him and smile, look away and frown, look at her feet and shake her head. A day alone with Memuneh could do that to anyone.

“The thing is,” she said, “I’m not sure that I even believe everything he told me.”

Austin swept sodden hair from her eyes. “I think some things he just makes up … to fit the way he wishes they were.”

“But
he
believes them, doesn’t he?”

“Oh yeah.”

“So if he acts on them like they are, then doesn’t that
make
them true? Just a little bit?”

“If you remain inside his tiny sphere, then maybe it does.”

She told him how they’d stopped to watch a hawk, twice — once on the way to the petroglyphs, again on the way back. Maybe it wasn’t the same hawk but that was hardly what mattered. Memuneh’s fascination with its gliding upon the air currents was at least as compelling as the bird itself, she said, and finally she’d watched him instead. His absorption whenever it flapped its wings.

“Even a cat eyeing something it’s about to pounce on doesn’t bring the same degree of focus as he brought to that hawk. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be that enthralled by watching something just go about its business,” she said. “Why did he share these things with me, Austin? I’m not anybody.”

“To me you are. And he draws a distinction between me and the rest of the town. He knew I wanted you to see him. Agreed to it.”

“And now we leave him behind,” she said. “I wish we could do something for
him
.”

You let him hold you the other night,
Austin thought.
I imagine he considers that payment enough.

But later, after they’d opened a jar of tamales and were heating them with rice over the fire, Austin began to wonder if the two of them hadn’t, in some benign but significant way, been used. Not to exaggerate his own importance, but Memuneh had nevertheless come to rely on him for companionship, and surely understood that this squalid shack wouldn’t be home forever.

Along comes Gabrielle, then, catalyst of that deliverance. As she was always meant to be. Memuneh might’ve even known it first … and so used her as a test before revealing himself to Miracle all over again. Letting her prove to him that not everyone here was the worst example of the human species.

A day alone with Gabrielle could do that to anyone.

Would Memuneh try again? Even now, somewhere in that glowing red horizon, was he hoping, planning, dreaming?

Austin thought it was one of the worst ideas he’d ever heard. Like Saint Francis when no one would listen, Memuneh belonged with the animals. They were so much less likely to disappoint him.

In the distance they could hear the coming of another train, and smiled at each other for everything the sound brought with it.

“Stars’ll be out soon,” he said.

“Maybe you should watch them by yourself tonight. I think,” she said, “I need to stay at the B-and-B. I have things in my head I need to get sorted out. I need to call Philippe. And if you have any … entanglements … you need to wrap up, maybe you should.”

Scarlett, she’d be thinking of. Wondering what the woman looked like. He didn’t tell her that this severance had already been taken care of, just told her she was right.

“Then tomorrow? We start fresh.” She reached out to touch his braid, the silver streak in his hair, the marks that his life had cut into his face. “I love you, Austin. I always have. But I never knew if that was enough. And I still don’t.”

He understood. So as the sun began to set on his last day in the desert he tried to soak in every diminishing ray. Let him hold them inside and let their fire burn there tonight so that tomorrow he could leave some ashen bit of himself smoldering on the ground, satisfied at last that it had the answers that mattered most.

*

“One of your philosophers — French, like the man you took for your husband — wrote ‘Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person’s heart.’

“If even the simplest man or woman is such a mass of contradictions, how much more so, then, is what you named God, simultaneously everything and its own opposite. God is life, God is death. God is growth, God is destruction. God is here, God is nowhere, always … and never.

“
Deus Absconditus
… the loving God Who Went Away.

“And so the Kyyth filled the void between, each of those contradictory thoughts, splintered off from the rest and contained within itself, with a mind of its own. So that we might come to you.

“It’s what our name means in the language of the first people we showed ourselves to, people the world no longer knows of. In their tongue ‘kyyth’ meant ‘bridge.’

“I would never tell this to Austin because there was so much he instinctively understood already, I felt it would benefit him to keep wondering about something.

“But I tell it to you, because I know he’ll be leaving soon and now I want him to know…”

*

The window of Gabrielle’s room faced east, and even through the blinds the light was bright enough to wake her. Sun and clock alike mocked her and the night she’d wasted.

She hated waking up fully clothed atop a made bed — the sleep never really seemed to count then. She hadn’t meant to drop off this way because she hadn’t meant to go to bed before calling Philippe. Which she hadn’t done because it was so much easier to worry about what she could take back to the magazine to possibly justify the trip here. “Interview With the Angel,” first in a three-part series? Have half the readership howling in protest — how gullible does she think we are? — and the other half applauding for all the wrong reasons: looove the irony.

One crisis at a time, please.

She looked at the clock again — 6:26.

Gabrielle heard from the bathroom the heavy plop of water as it dripped from the faucet into the tub. Odd — it sounded as though the tub were full. Which couldn’t be. She’d always used the shower. Never even stoppered the drain in the first place.

Austin would be here at 10:00. Give or take. He’d follow her to Salt Lake City, where she’d turn in the rental and hope his car was sound enough to endure to the east coast.

That dripping — a full tub, definitely. She listened to it for a few moments, perplexed; but a pleasant sound if you were in the mood. Promise of warmth and steam on a winter day, or a cool soak on one like today. But as her head cleared of the morning groggies the more she realized it shouldn’t have been promising
anything
right now.

When she got up to check, Gabrielle halted in the bathroom doorway. The tub could wait.

She knew without the slightest prompt that this was Austin’s woman. Scarlett, sitting on the toilet lid. It couldn’t be anyone else. In a town this size, she and Austin would find each other because there was something barbaric about the both of them, although Austin seemed to have bested it. And what had he implied — the relationship was only physical? In that case, she didn’t need to see Scarlett at all. This was a woman whose bodily tenure you really didn’t want to follow.

“How did you get in here?”

The faucet, dripping. The ripples, gentle across the water.

When Scarlett stood up, Gabrielle saw her arm, Hadn’t noticed it until now, the way Scarlett had been holding it down and out of view. Saw the smear of blood along the inside of her forearm. Saw something jutting from — oh god.

“You’re hurt,” Gabrielle said. The woman had come here to commit suicide, was that it? For the statement it made?

But no. It wasn’t Scarlett’s wrist that was the problem. Whatever was stuck into her was emerging from a split across the palm, just above the heel of her hand. Wide and flat and dense, almost blade-like, a cleaver or short machete. But not the color of metal. No, this was pale, almost a bone-white, and—