Heady with stirred-up testosterone, Jason and Leo Jr. made for Hastings Creek after they bid the cart racers goodbye and promised to make another run the next day. What met them was a sight Barman described as “something out of the Apocalypse of John the Divine.”
Amidst crushed ferns a two-headed beast writhed, while the sound of trumpets sundered the welkin. On the blast of the seventh, they perceived “a woman clothed with the sun, the moon, and the stars, and Satan cast down to earth.”
Barman insists to this day that it was a trick of filtered light and shadow created by the trees that led to the visual confusion, and that the sound of trumpets was thunder preceding a storm. To Barman’s embarrassment they’d stumbled onto a private scene of two young people in the thrall of carnal exuberance. (Some of us believe what occurred there by the creek was a result of Yabbashael’s taking the protector role of Jason as “big” brother too seriously.)
Jason heaved up a large, muddy stone from the side of the creek while Leo Jr. stood by as if in a trance. He brought the stone down on the back of the beast, at which point a scream cleared the air. Jessica lay under a seemingly lifeless Cullen as blood ran into his ponytail from a fissure in his neck. Her eyes, Barman recalls, were terrible, like the maw of a deep-sea dweller. When she spoke, it was in the inner voice of Rachmiel, who said, as if it cost everything Rachmiel had to give, “May the God forgive you.” The sky thundered again as the deluge started and Jessica struggled back into her clothes.
The rest happened quickly. An ambulance was fetched, a tale concocted. Lubbock, Gary, and Sweeney, swearing their innocence, indignant spittle flying, were arrested by the end of the day. Leo Jr. took the extra keys to the Costellos’ Ford Escape, and-with only eighteen months of payments remaining- totalled the front end driving into the side of a Dairy Queen. Jason went into his bedroom and refused to come out for three days, almost as comatose as Cullen himself. (Yabbashael planned to remain in self-exile for forty days and forty nights until Barman pointed out that Yabbashael was not the Christ.)
Amidst all this drama, Bashaar had his star turn in the school musical, which, according to the local weeklies, was a hit, and Stephan was suspended and threatened with repeating grade eight.
“So what.” Elyon shrugged. “He’s never had this much fun in his life.” The Choo house visibly sagged in on itself as his parents shuffled downcast from room to room. Stephan’s grandmother no longer gathered offerings but sat in front of the basement television set watching Fox News.
Leo Jr.’s neck brace stayed on for almost three weeks, and to this day his right hand is not as mobile as his left due to the manner in which the broken bones fused.
Even now, so many years on, we take pains to remind each other of what Augustine once said: “Angelus est nomen offici,” which Barman suggests translating as, “‘Angel’ is the name of the office.”
In other words, it’s our job, not who we are. We mention this as a fact, not as a kind of apologia.
Jessica skipped school regularly to visit the hospitalized Cullen, who was hooked up to all manner of medical equipment in Lions Gate Hospital’s ICU, and unresponsive. She held his hand for hours every day. (Once, when he blinked and appeared to part his lips, his mother said, “She’s an angel of mercy!” before leaving the room, crying. Rachmiel admitted praying for intervention from St. Jude. But did Rachmiel ask for a miracle? We think not.)
In mid-June, Bashaar was at the Shoppers Drug Mart buying condoms when he spotted Jessica pulling a pregnancy kit from a shelf. Bash slid up behind her and whispered, “You weren’t going to tell us, were you?” She was so startled she dropped the Very-Berry Slurpee she was carrying in her other hand, splashing them both with what looked like clotted blood.
After everything that had happened, at last a true crisis was upon us, one that we could not simply turn the other cheek on and hope for the best.
Even Elyon joined us as we debated late into the night whether to destroy the child or both mother and child-deep within us stirred and rumbled the fear of waking the slumbering Nephilim. Rachmiel argued, in the end effectively, that the warlike giants of old were the spawn of rogue angels and mortal women, not of angels and mortal men, so we agreed to stay our hands.
No one used the word smite. Not once. Not even Elyon.
The summons that came from Gabriel that night was firm and unequivocal. We were recalled from earth with no time to say our goodbyes.
We took our shameful leave as day dawned on Arcadia Court, all but Rachmiel, who made a choice one of our kind has seldom made, and not without enormous sacrifice. Jessica’s small, moon-white face was pressed to the Wadsworths’ bay window as if there were something to see besides a blue, cloudless sky. Zachriel wrote a message across the firmament in white wisps: Errare humanum est. Perseverare diabolicum. He meant it kindly.
Our mission aborted, we took sensory experiences with us as if we were junior entomologists pinning to a corkboard butterfly specimens snuffed out with ethyl acetate. But what we left behind is what we remember most vividly. One thing we all agree on: the much-vaunted human heart is just a wayward muscle.
Not long after we left, young Stephan Choo was found face down in Hastings Creek near the place where Cullen had sustained his injury. His suicide note remains hidden, to this day, in a jade Fortune Vase in his parents’ pantry. Six months later, on the adoption papers Jessica Wadsworth signed, her premature daughter bore the name Stephanie in complicated and guilty tribute. Cullen emerged from his coma with no further interest in either Rilke or Jessica and her predicament. We could have told her so.
It took a while, years in fact, but Bashaar eventually succumbed to the enticements of his patient recruiters. The Khan family’s garage became a repository of Kemira GrowHow fertilizer and pallets of nail-polish remover. Local authorities were tipped off. The rest was all dutifully reported in the media, including Bashaar’s bewildered parents claiming they believed the supplies were for their son’s year-end biochemistry project at SFU, their dark eyes a haunting. YouTube footage of the much younger and still beardless “home-grown terrorist” dancing on the stage of Elysium Heights Secondary’s gymnasium singing “Strange Thing Mystifying” went viral.
The Wad carried on being a wad.
As for Leo Jr., he turned out fine. Like his father he became a forensic accountant. He auditioned for Jeopardy! once while on a business trip to Atlanta, but after the eighteen-month waiting period lapsed, simply forgot about it. We try not to judge, but we had imagined a life of more freedom for him, perhaps as a first AD for local film productions or a tennis coach. In another era he could have joined a travelling circus. But he abides.
And us? We have a special dispensation to watch over Jessica’s child, even though we know she is more than capable of taking care of herself.
On our phantom tongues the taste of humanity lingers. But something else as well. The fifth taste?
That thing that eludes us still.
BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES
The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.
– ELIAS CANETTI, THE AGONY OF FLIES
SKULLBLAST
Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia’s pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living-room window. The recovering terrorist-holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew-moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.