Jessica’s formerly papery skin shone, and curves appeared in places where before there had been alarming concavity. The boys were paying attention in the cafeteria and around her locker, although some kept their distance on account of her being The Wad’s sister. The girls were a different matter. A tiny curly-haired warlord named Montana puffed out her cheeks and told her posse: “If she doesn’t stop stuffing her face she’ll end up like that blimp in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.”
“Well, you know how girls can be,” Zachriel said.
“In fact,” said Rachmiel, uncharacteristically snappy, “I don’t.”
It turned out that Bash, who had a fine tenor and could dance, had been cast as Judas Iscariot in the school’s spring production of Jesus Christ Superstar before we’d appeared on the scene. His role made the rest of us nervous, but Zachriel had begun to admire Tim Rice and Sir Andrew’s sympathetic view of the betrayer. “Besides,” said Zachriel, “he gets all the best songs.”
During the day we did our best to avoid each other as our social hierarchies dictated, but at night we lay in our beds in welcome darkness and communicated again without the boundaries of language. Speaking in tongues without need of tongues, bodiless once more.
On the ceiling of Stephan’s bedroom was a glow-in-the-dark solar system, the North Star peeling away. On the wall of Leo Jr.’s room, posters from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Beside Jason’s pillow, a plush dolphin and an oversized neon-pink hedgehog won at the previous summer’s PNE and hidden away under the bed each morning.
“How is this really different from texting?” Zachriel asked one night. Zachriel was the only one of us who’d taken to social media.
“It’s different in spirit,” Barman said, “and, besides, there’s no need for opposable thumbs.”
For some of us, high school was shaping up to be a regular pit of Acheron. (“The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night,” quoth Elyon, who was finding solace in Shakespeare despite the earlier classroom misadventure.) Only ten more days to go before spring break. We began to think in terms of miracles.
How much easier it had been for Mohammed and Siddhartha, not to mention the Christ, who did not have to wander the earth incognito. “If only we could smite just a little to blow off some steam,” Elyon said.
“I love that word, smite,” Yabbashael said.
“You guys,” Rachmiel told them, “go to sleep.”
It’s true we could have materialized as ravens or, in the spirit of humility, earthworms. But then how could we have partaken of all that was available to the human senses? In times past our kind have appeared as griffins or lightning or even in the form we’ve been represented in over the ages, luxuriously robed, or nude with dimpled flesh, wings either terrible or elegant- Masaccio’s sword-wielding avenger, Bloch’s pallid ectomorph, Melozzo’s curly-haired candy-box creatures. But there is something too attention-getting about those guises. Something altogether beside the point.
Soon after we left Arcadia Court a giant sea tortoise, purportedly thousands of years old, appeared several blocks over on another cul-de-sac, carrying on his back a lost schoolgirl from Japan. A miracle that was quickly covered up, as it seemed it wasn’t miracles these people wanted.
And while we inhabited their bodies, Bashaar, Stephan, Leo Jr., Jason, and Jessica, the children of Arcadia Court, partook of a heaven-sent dreamless sleep. There were times, we admit, that we envied them.
Stephan didn’t leave the house the whole week of spring break, and when he finally emerged we almost didn’t recognize him. Gone were the too-short sweatpants and checked shirts and white socks; gone were the duct-taped glasses. In their place, oversized jeans, black hoodie, and red-framed Soulja Boy sunglasses. (Gone too was approximately $500 from the university savings his superstitious parents kept hidden in a jade Fortune Vase in the pantry behind tins of water chestnuts.) When we converged on him, Stephan simply raised a hand and said, “Word.”
He failed a math test that week, the first of many, and when called on in English or Socials he’d say things like, “Existential angst, man,” ignoring meaningful pokes from Leo Jr. (“Stephan’s so random,” his male classmates said approvingly, so we could only conclude this was a good thing, this doing poorly in school and waxing random.)
Stephan spent much of this time on multiplayer role-playing games online. By all accounts he was a master at World of Warcraft: Realm of Cocytus, “smiting the enemy,” who consisted of a new kind of Wyrm and Nephilim-a.k.a. “those douche-bags,” according to the faux-hawk kid. (Barman scoffed at how the game developers stole so readily from ur-biblical sources. “Nephilim. They have no idea what they’re dealing with. No wonder Elyon has their number.”)
We soon heard reports that Stephan was hacking for his classmates. His new admirers were his old adversaries, pimply boys with too much pocket money who took to intoning “S’mite” to each other in greeting.
Yabbashael and Barman tried to talk sense into Elyon one afternoon in the Choo family’s backyard. “You two should talk,” Elyon said, eyes non-existent behind those disconcerting lenses, avoiding directly addressing Barman. “His guy was already cool, and your guy is an armoured vehicle.” Barman asked if this was all some kind of twisted revenge scenario, but Elyon only said, “By the time we leave, Stephan will be made.”
On an early April morning Stephan’s parents slowly chewed and swallowed their shame dumplings and visited the school counsellor, shuffling along the main hall of Elysium Heights Secondary, past the glass-fronted trophy case filled with testaments to young male and female physical prowess, their son strutting behind them.
Stephan’s ancient grandmother, who lived in the basement suite of the family home, had been making twice-daily offerings to Kwan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion, on her small Buddhist shrine. Zachriel saw her that day walking along the edge of the ravine behind Arcadia Court, bending painfully to tug up freshly blooming false Solomon’s seal and collect choice pine cones. The moist-earth aroma, Zachriel said, was almost indecent. Nearby, on a dying Douglas fir, a pileated woodpecker let loose with a maniacal laugh and went back to his drumming. Stephan’s grandmother raised her tortoise face and (Zachriel swore on Bashaar’s JC Superstar script, rolled up in his back pocket) echoed that lunatic laughter right back at the bird.
What karmic justice, she might have been thinking, had led her to be a ninety-six-year-old woman traipsing through the rainforest at the edge of the world, mother to an aging son whose own child had lost all sense of filial piety?
We couldn’t help but wonder how was it that we could be drawn to an object, that a pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone wire, the rubber curling back from the heels, could break our hearts, yet we felt so little for the suffering of these parents?
That same day, Jessica’s mother steered her to the couch when she came home in a shirt two sizes smaller than the one she’d left the house wearing and tried to engage her in a heartto-heart about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, and dressing like a harlot-although the word she used was “slut.” We found it both interesting and disturbing that people’s attitudes towards women and their bodies had changed so little since the days of Nebuchadnezzar II. (“The Madonna/whore dichotomy is so tired,” sighed Barman.)