But she couldn’t be furious, not when she saw how his clothes hung from him when he stood. In his gauntness she sensed the awful solitude of those years since they’d parted. Gabrielle could see him waking up in places that weren’t home and never could be, no romance of adventure to it, only momentum. Maybe he’d made room in his life for the arcane forms of magick, but this had left none for its everyday counterparts. She would’ve bet her life on it: He’d had no one with whom to subdivide a Sunday newspaper. Or sniff the air after a cleansing spring shower. He’d had no one to leave him sweet notes to find on mornings he’d slept late.
She stepped forward, and so did he. The hug was awkward and stiff. When her cheek brushed against his hard bare shoulder its skin was hot, like a tiny sun.
“Don’t send me away from here feeling like the last eleven years of my life were a mistake,” she said. “You could probably do it if you wanted to, but if you did, that’s something I would never forgive you for. Don’t do that to me.”
Austin drawing back, peering at her — nobody just got up one morning and decided he wanted his eyes to look like that. It had to be earned. Had to accrue. She didn’t want him to say anything to make it better. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t be trite. Nothing that wouldn’t be at least half a lie.
For all the years had done to him, and all she imagined he’d done to himself, when he touched her it was easy to forget she was another man’s wife. Austin needed no magick for that.
And when she heard an old, familiar sound in the distance she was grateful for the way out of the moment it provided.
Smiling now. “Do you know how many years it’s been since I’ve heard a train whistle?”
“No.” Turning it back on her then: “Do you?”
She brushed his cheek with the back of her fingers, knowing they must be thinking different versions of the same thing: that this had all begun with a train.
“Besides the almost-nonexistent rent, that was part of the appeal of this place: I could hear that whistle every day,” he said. “The railroad runs past about a mile away. What we’re hearing now, it’s coming through Miracle. There’s an intersection at one end of the town.”
“How long have you been in this awful place?”
“Nine, ten months. Not long after Miracle started living up to its name last year.”
“Kind of short-lived, wasn’t it?”
“That depends on where you look.”
They waited for the train in the dust and heat. She’d begun to sweat, too aware now of her clothing. Her slacks, her jacket, were all wrong. She was nowhere that labels mattered. They watched the train pass in the distance, engines and boxcars, flatcars and tankers. Listened to the steel rhythm of the wheels. In their clatter lived something soothing, that lulled and rocked until it faded away, leaving a stillness as immense as the heat.
Austin gestured toward the shack. “And now I guess I owe you a wonder or two…?”
She realized now that she’d come not out of expectation, but concern, the only person in the world with a chance of convincing him he needed help. Austin was still young, relatively. He could have many years ahead. Productive years. Fulfilling years. Sane years.
His shack had the suggestion of a porch, scarcely a yard in depth. The boards bowed gently under their weight. He pushed open the door; it squealed on hinges free of rust but thirsty for oil. Past the threshold it was as stifling as she’d expected, and as spare. He kept it touchingly tidy, though, with crates for furniture, clothing and books in their places, along with a few items that had traveled with him, and the tools of obsession that he’d begun to collect even before she’d left him. Mattress on the floor in one corner, cast iron wood stove in another. Lantern and candles; intricate patterns smeared onto the walls and even though they were dry they still drew flies. Best not to think about that.
Eccentric and poverty-stricken, but nothing earth-shaking.
Although there was one more door.
“Ready?” he said. She told him she was.
Austin pushed the door open and took her by the hand. She let herself be drawn in after him, another room of bare rude walls and exposed nailheads and mouse droppings and little windows whose square panes had grown cloudy enough to distort their view of the desert beyond. She looked up at the only thing here to see.
At first she thought Austin must’ve hung the body aloft, but ruled this out. She saw no ropes, no wires. Male, she decided, but she was seeing him from the back, curled into a fetal position like a child cowering in a corner. And corner it was, but a corner made by walls and ceiling, not walls and floor.
Floating. He was floating.
She recalled what Austin had told her on the phone, cryptic though he’d been: It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns.
Austin, stooping to retrieve something from the floor along one wall … a cue stick, too ratty for the billiards table.
Its voice isn’t anything special, either.
Austin, stepping around her to thrust the cue stick up like a spear, jabbing the floater in the side. The man — she couldn’t yet bring herself to think of him as anything else — twisted, sprawling on his back across the ceiling, trying to shrink from the assault. His face looked miserable, like a child poked and teased to tears.
But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.
She remembered the things that had been claimed last year about the town of Miracle, or what it had claimed about itself.
“Austin,” she murmured. Unable to shift her eyes from this toppling of reality, man cringing on the ceiling overhead, nothing holding him up there but … but what? Ignorance of gravity?
“There are no such things as angels, Austin. There aren’t.”
“You’re telling me,” he said. Lowering the cue stick, resting its rubberized blunt end on the floor. “There’s only these lying pricks.”
*
Let me tell you about syllogisms.
If, as the more secular among us claim, your only guarantee in life is a measure of pain, and if, as their more pious brethren claim, the only thing in this world you can rely on is God, then what does that tell you about the Almighty’s nature?
Consider the humble fiber of striated muscle. To strengthen it, to build its mass, it must first be worked. Abused to the point of destruction, fibers begin to shred, tearing one from another in an ordeal of burning and exhaustion.
As the body, so the soul.
Let me tell you, then, about God’s work.
Let me tell you about suffering.
Let me tell you about pain.
II. Terra Incognita
As adults they’d argued about it for years, good-natured but insistent and unyielding: Austin swore that Gabrielle had moved in next door the summer he was nine because it was the same year his father had broken his ankle during league softball and the family had done without its annual vacation. Gabrielle claimed it had to have been the following summer, when he was ten and she was nine, because they’d moved a few months after her grandmother had died and left them the money to do it. There was no middle ground to be had here. The argument had eventually been shelved.
They could agree, at least, that it had been a hot summer, humid, but summers in Kentucky always were — all those lakes and rivers. It had been a summer of scabbed knees and the occasional rash. The neighborhood wasn’t so full of kids that he could afford to ignore the one next door, newcomer girl or not, so there’d been no trial period. They’d taken to each other and that was that.