What kind of journey would that have been? From where to where? Across what unknown plains, across what desolate mountains and valleys writhing with shadows? And time had no meaning, there was no time. Some might have fallen away, or drifted off, or been lured to follow other paths, and they were lost. The figure had to keep the rest moving. Because the figure had found a way out. Not for himself. His life was done. For them, because they had not yet lived their full lives, and that was the crack in the glass.
How would they get out? In the same nightmare haze that had brought them there? Like a clap of thunder, jolting them awake in the middle of the night? Was there, far ahead, a thousand miles ahead, a small hole of light against the darkness, and they followed that like the eye of a candle?
Would they find themselves and their clothes dusted with red rock, as if they’d been reformed, squeezed through the walls of the mountain and remade on the other side? Would they find little glimmers of silver in their hair? And what might the reverend say to the misshapen figure on the last day, at the last instant before escape? What is your name?
And he might answer, in a voice from the depths of suffering: My name is—
“Stop it,” Kate said. “Really.”
True breathed softly. His elbow was hurting, but it would be better soon.
“Something like that,” he said, “would shake the foundations of the world.”
“Well, you’ve got a big imagination. I’ve always known that. When you retire, you ought to write the story.”
“No. I’ll just wait for it to happen.” True stared out the window, at the lights of humanity. Blue dawn was beginning to assert itself against the night. Interesting, he thought, to consider retirement. His injury would probably hasten it. And it might be good to go out as a big dog, with a big Medal Of Valor as his chewtoy.
“I’m thinking of a career in management,” he said.
Kate dared not ask what that meant. But she thought she’d go ahead and get up and take him to the IHOP out by the airport for one of his favorite meals: the syrupy pancakes, crumbled-up bacon and yellow-drippy eggs all mixed together.
She decided she was going to stop worrying so much about his heart.
At least, for one day.
< >
Nomad and Ariel were on the road. She had left her car at their last stop, a place to watch freshly-baked doughnuts ride along a conveyor belt, becoming sprinkled with sugar or cinammon or sparkling with fresh glaze at the end of the line. They had climbed into his Focus, which was a blood brother to the Scumbucket with its crumpled front fender, its scrapes along the passenger’s side, its dents and dings and bangs and bumps. He’d bought it cheap from another musician, with some of these imperfections already there, but he’d added a lot himself too. He realized now, as they followed the crooked headlights along a Texas road with the windows down and the pre-dawn air sweetened by night, that he probably could afford a new set of wheels.
It had been a full night, for sure. A mug of black coffee, not so bitter, and a cup of silver needle tea at a little downtown place called Selma’s, which had about a dozen tables and served great chocolate brownies, though Ariel declined to order one. They’d started talking there, about the song. Then Nomad had decided he was really hungry, so they’d met again at the Magnolia Café, and this time Ariel had ordered a veggie Reuben when Nomad asked for a hamburger, and please make sure there’s no cheese on it, and could the waitress make it, like, medium rare so it’s a little pink in the middle?
And the waitress had said, “You got it.”
They had continued talking about the song.
“So,” Nomad had said, as the late-night crowd ate and drank and the waitresses buzzed around, “what happened, then?”
“I don’t know that anything happened.” They’d been over this ground at Selma’s, but Ariel knew it was important for him to backtrack and go over it again, looking for what he might have missed.
“Something had to have happened. Really.” He put his elbows on the table and looked her square in her mystic eyes. His ankle was sore from standing and sore from driving, but if the day ever came that he couldn’t take a little pain, he would be ready to kick out of this strange old world. Which was definitely not new. Or was it? He didn’t know. According to Ariel’s belief, they’d been given the task of writing a song by a girl who was something other than human. They hadn’t asked for it, but there it was. Then, according to Ariel’s belief, Jeremy Pett had been given the task of stopping the song from being finished, by something he called ‘Gunny’. Or was Pett just totally insane? What about Connor Addison, and the nutbag in the trailer park?
Nomad wondered about that trailer, parked in the flat hot desert on the ‘angel line’ radiating from the north side of Stone Church, or Apache Leap as it used to be called. That dumb fuck, the so-called Navy electronics expert, couldn’t tell his angels from his demons. Nomad wondered if someone who—and this sounded like Ariel thinking—was able to pick up vibes and shit could stand in that trailer, in the room the nutbag had used as his comm central, and listen, or feel, or sense, or whatever, a quiet in the wires. Maybe a few scattered mutterings passed, like distant voices heard from a pirate radio station through a wallplug, just faintly there, or maybe a squeal of static that was not static at all but an ungodly voice raised in anger, and then drifting away in a whimper like a whipped dog. And maybe chatterings passed, like teeth being ground down to nubs, or a sudden “You!” jumping out, all fucked-up sounding and muddy, as if in recrimination for a battleplan defeated.
But, most of all, a quiet in the wires.
Maybe an ominous quiet. One that said there were other battleplans to be made, because it was a forever war.
It had been a bitch writing that song. Ariel had been adamant that he needed to write a verse. He wanted nothing to do with it. He feared that when it was done, and played as their last song, the whole of Vista Futura would be sucked down a cosmic drain—gurgle, gurgle, gurgle—to Hell, to Heaven, or to some dimension in between, and they’d have to be fighting off crows in the eternal blackberry brambles when they weren’t filling baskets for Jesus. He just had no idea what was about to happen.
You need to write a verse, Ariel had told him with fire in her voice. It came from you first, do you understand that? Mike started it, but it came from you first. You have to write a verse.
In the Albuquerque hospital where they were waiting for True’s wife to arrive, he’d looked at what she’d written, at the title she’d given it, and he’d asked, “What’s this about?”
“Don’t you know yet?”
He did, really.
It was about acceptance, he realized. Accepting who you are, within the limitations of a hard old world. It was realizing that sometimes things in the tough old world squeezed you, and crushed you, and drove you down into the dirt. But to survive, to keep going, you had to lighten yourself. To cast off things that no longer mattered, things that wore you down or weighed heavy on you. You needed courage to keep going, and sometimes you found it in yourself and sometimes in others. And it might seem hopeless, it might seem a fool’s path, and it was never safe travel even though an angel might wish it were so for you, and some things never changed, they never would, but nothing ever changed unless you believed they could.
And it was still the same old world as it had been yesterday. It was still a hard old world, a tough old world. It would always remain so. But it was a world that could not be described in just four minutes, with all its universe of good and evil, strong and weak, light and dark. It was the world, as it would ever be.