From the Teeth of Angels Read online

  “Terrific, Wyatt. That’s what I love about you. Finky Linky at his best. That’s not on my agenda but, hey, who knows, right? Life’s funny. No, I’m going to give you two something much better than ten more years. I’m going to give you your lives.”

  Both of us must have stiffened at that, because He put up His hands as if He were trying to hold us back. “No, no, I don’t mean that. I’m going to give you your lives as they really have been.

  “Arlen, you’re the big poetry buff. Remember Delmore Schwartz? Come on, the book’s on the third shelf from the bottom of your library. I liked him. Guy went crazy with all the knowledge he had but no one knew it. There’s one poem in particular that’s great. I’ll have to paraphrase it because I didn’t get a chance to memorize it the way the great actress does. ‘No one really knows themselves because they don’t know what the rest of the world thinks of them.’ Hits the nail right on the head. We’re all friends here, so I can tell you a secret. The trouble with people is, no matter how well they think they know themselves, they never really do because they have no idea what other people are thinking of them.”

  “You just said that.” I couldn’t stop it. The line popped out by itself.

  His face flashed mean, but then He smiled. “I didn’t; Delmore did. And he was a hundred percent correct. What I’m going to do right now, this very minute, is let you both relive your lives with genuine and complete knowledge of what everything and everyone around you is thinking. About you, about their lives, the works. I’ll even let you in on the conversations of plants and other surprises.”

  Without an instant’s thought, the idea terrified me. “What’s the point?”

  “The point is to show why I don’t like you, and Finky why I like him. That’s what you wanted down deep in your little secret heart, wasn’t it?”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “It’s always more than that, honey, but I want to do it, so that’s that.”

  The waiter brought the beer and Leland thanked him. He took a long drink and licked the shine and bubbles off His lips. “It’s enlightenment. Guys go and live on top of mountains their whole lives to attain it, but I’m giving it to you for free.”

  “So I can know more about what my mother thought of me?”

  “Partly. Partly. But there were good things too that you didn’t know about. Now you’ll know them too.”

  Wyatt reached over and put his hand on Leland’s arm. “I don’t want it. Please don’t do it.”

  “It’s done.”

  This is what I learned.

  First the cells spoke. They sang to each other as they moved and divided and grew together. They were sure of what they were doing. Workmen, they knew their tasks and relished the building of whatever it was they were there to build. They had no idea what it would finally be; they knew only their specific jobs, and they did them and spoke to each other of alignment, angles, space, and distance. If they were dumb, they were dumb with a purpose and weren’t sorry they knew so little. They were here to do this and it was enough for them. It was their life. They died easily because they had no idea of death. It came and they were gone. They had no names, no specific identities. Others were born and replaced them and did the same jobs. Their work was impossibly difficult but they did not know those words, so it was simply work and they did it. Slowly, over months, their labor came together and grew, filled with billions of voices talking, always talking about the job, about what came next, who must move where or what else must be done.

  Awareness came slowly, like honey dripping off a spoon. Sensations. Touch. What is this? Awareness comes, but it is not here-I-am so much as the discovery of connected parts. This is here now, but a moment ago I didn’t know that. It belongs. The honey spills onto the table and spirals around, forming a hill that melts down when more honey falls on it, and the hill begins to rise again, over and over. When the drip stops, the pool slowly takes shape and, if allowed, has its final form. This is the finish. This is what it is.

  I was born on September 1 under a full moon, and every tide on earth, including the press and heave of my mother, knew each other. Like the cells, they worked in magnificent concert. Off the Cape of Good Hope, they pushed the great fish toward shore and it was a battle of love and esteem between the water and them to see who would win. A young woman in Morocco looked between her legs and ran screaming to her mother, terror-stricken by her womanhood, which had just begun. In Turkey, a man named Haroun watched a woman sleep and said yes to her in his mind because the decision belonged to the moon and not to him.

  I knew all this. As I came into the world bathed in my mother’s blood and cries, I still knew that there was no difference between anything but soon there would be because already my brain was bursting and winking, splitting itself into a million distinctions; the awe and flood of the opening moment in life when you learn first of all that you are alone now forever and what you were together a second ago is forgotten.

  Mother hated me from the beginning. It was almost soothing to know. She hated the weight, the bad complexion and strange moods, the tension of her belly against her favorite summer dress, and the constant need of her body to give all for two now, always two.

  She had been wrong. She had thought this child would save her life, give it purpose, show her who she was. But all it did was make her responsible for one more. She felt she had been tricked. Love was to blame, or my father, anything, me most of all. I was proof of the trick, demanding, selfish proof she had chosen wrong and would never now be given a chance to correct it.

  As I grew older she forgot that this was at the center of her despair and thought different things about me. Almost all of them tentative, as if she were trying to learn to skate again across the surface of her life after a near-fatal fall.

  The cells continued to sing, but I was a child and my confusion and great joy came together somehow and drowned out their more subtle music. Love came and defined itself to me differently every day. I wanted it but it was as elusive as a fly. It constantly buzzed louder in my face, a new sound in my head, but when I looked toward it, it was always somewhere else. The world I was coming to know was both enthralling and treacherous and made me want to be in every part at once, as I once had been with no effort at all. Effort. I learned what that meant but it did me no good. Everything was so separate now, singing its own distinct song that was sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous but very loud and hitting against me with tremendous force.

  The first person I knew I loved – knew it—was a tall woman with a short man’s face who was my mother’s best friend. The first time I hurt and knew it was when I reached for her earrings and discovered I couldn’t touch them.

  My life spun through its days, and I was bombarded with things I had not known but were now clear and understandable. That was Leland’s cruelty: What good did it do now? If only I’d known then, would life have been better? Would I have loved people and things that loved me; would my life have been infinitely better had I known the value of these great gifts?

  As I made my life, ignoring what I didn’t know or understand, I was carving myself down into a distinct form, yes, but the pieces and chips that fell away were so necessary.

  Leland’s “gift” was only a trip to a hell that was wholly and hopelessly my own. The torment there was not from knives into flesh or bodies in flames, but from neglect and disregard, underrating and blindness to so many things that could have been mine and made me whole but never were.

  I have no idea how long the experience took, but when I returned to my life now, the three of us were still sitting in the seedy espresso joint and the only different thing was that Leland had a frankfurter in his hand and was dipping it into a small pile of yellow mustard on a white plate. I looked at him, but his eyes were on his food. The return to now was firm and immediate, yet the sense of loss filled every part of my being.

  When I slowly moved my eyes to Wyatt, I saw him looking at the table with what, I was sure, was t
he same facial cast as mine—bewildered, lost, light years away. I wanted to say something, or wanted to hear his voice first and not Leland’s blithe menace.

  Wyatt did speak first, but he said something which, after that experience, was wholly unexpected. He looked up from the table and his face cleared to wonder. “I had forgotten all about that. Completely.”

  “What’s that, Fmky?”

  “The last days of my father. I’d forgotten that whole time right before he died.”

  “Was it nice?”

  Wyatt opened his mouth and started to speak but stopped. “It—yes, yes, it was. It really was.”

  “See, I told you there’d be nice things. How was your trip, Arlen?”

  I had nothing to say. He knew.

  Wyatt spoke again. “I can’t believe I forgot that. Right before my father died, I stayed with him and my mother. He was in very bad shape and the only energy he had left was for anger. Anger at life, my mother, and me. Anger at everything.”

  “The guy wasn’t very happy, was he?”

  “He wasn’t a happy man his whole life, so what could we expect at the end? When I got there, I tried to lift him by being funny and lively, but he wasn’t having any of it. I talked to him and read to him from his favorite books, but every few minutes he would cry out his pain or anger. After a few days it became very difficult, and my mother and I talked a long time about taking him to a hospital, but neither of us had the heart. At the end that’s what happened, but it didn’t come for a while.

  “One night very late I woke up when I heard him cry out. I went to his room. My mother was exhausted, and when I met her at the door I told her to go back to bed; I’d take care of him as long as he needed me. He heard that and laughed and said, ‘I don’t need either of you. I need to die arid get it over with.’

  I looked at Leland. He shrugged and said, “His pop was right—he wasn’t doing anyone any good.”

  Wyatt went on as if the other hadn’t spoken. “So I sat down in that dark room next to his bed and said, ‘Pop, I want you to tell me about the best day of your life. Tell me everything. I want to hear every detail you can remember.’ Woo! That pissed him off! He didn’t want to talk about life; he wanted sympathy and some way out of his pain. But I coaxed and cajoled and after a while I could almost see him settling his body into a more comfortable position. His voice started out rough and nasty, but as he went along it softened, and the more he got into the story, the quieter it got.

  “Funnily, it wasn’t a particularly interesting story. It was about a day he had spent on the island of Peleliu during the Second World War. He was young and knew the world would be waiting for him when he got home. He described the island and what was going on that day, the job he had there and other things. Just a day in the life of a young man who figured himself lucky, and after all those years he remembered how good it had been. I milked him for every detail, and maybe he knew what I was doing but went along with it because remembering was pleasant, and the only other things he had left were his pain and that dark room. When he was done he tried to slough it off as if it’d been nothing, but I wouldn’t let him do that. I asked about other things that mattered to him, other memories stuck in his mind that some part of him was happy to look at again and talk about. I don’t think I ever felt so close to him in my life.”

  “But two weeks later you did put him in the hospital and he died.”

  Wyatt looked at Leland and then away, as if what He had said was embarrassing. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Ah, I’m just being mean. Sorry. Memories are nice things. Sometimes they almost fill the holes.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t know if you can do it, but I have to ask.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Can you show us God?”

  Leland put the meat down and wiped his fingers on a paper napkin. “I can, but I’d have to do it in a way you’d understand. Otherwise it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

  Wyatt put his hand on his neck. “Please. Please show us God. If we’re going to die, I want to know.” He turned to me, his hand still there. “Do you want that, Arlen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, but let me finish my hot dogs. It’s better to do this on a full stomach.”

  We sat and watched him finish his meal. He didn’t do it slowly but wasn’t in a hurry either.

  “But it will be true? What you show us will be the absolute truth?”

  “The absolute truth. You’re not the first ones who’ve asked, you know. It’s no big deal.” He took a few more bites, then dropped what was left on his plate and wiped his hands on his trousers. He’d always called them pants, but I’d taught him to say trousers. He bent to one side and slid a hand into his pocket. He brought out a postcard and put it down on the table in front of us.

  It was a photograph of the earth taken from high in space. Before either of us could say anything, there was noise. A hum, a kind of distant rumbling. The table and the room faded, disappeared, and I knew I was suddenly in space looking down on earth.

  It was immense and took up my whole vision. The blue of the seas and white of the clouds, the brown land and curves of the continents this close, from this vantage point, were transcendent. For the first time I understood the wonder of astronauts, the love of people who spent their lives studying the heavens.

  When that first miracle passed, I was able to listen, and realized the noise I had heard at the beginning was the sound of the earth from very far away. No, that was not completely true. Much of the sound came from the murmur of airplane engines as they cut their arcs and passages across the skies. Thousands of airplanes moving here and there filled with people and cargo, hope and destinations. Stately and slow, they went from day to night and back, secure in their act. The sound grew and I heard the voices from within, the conversations of people five miles above this earth. Engines and their voices, the keening of air across the metal bodies, the excitement of arrival, the warmth of expectation. These small lights against the black sky, moving across the night, emerging silver and fragile yet whole again into the light of day. The earth crisscrossed in every direction by planes. I saw it all from such a distance that it enabled me to understand.

  For perhaps God was this, the earth and the lines of azimuth and the lines of planes and the lines of talk and the lines of everything crossing from one end to the other, forever.

  “You kept your little house so clean and orderly, Arlen. Down on your knees scrubbing away at the floors, everything perfect. But in the end all you’ve got are chaos and connections you don’t understand. There is no order, even with Him; only takeoffs and landings.”

  This time I was not surprised to be back. Rather than look at Him, I reached across the table and picked up the fork the waiter had brought for His meal.

  “Did it help, Finky? Did it help to see God?”

  Silence.

  I didn’t look up. I put the fork flat on the table and moved it back and forth. I put my finger on top of the stem and moved it on and off.

  “I have to go soon and meet Ms. Marhoun. Are there any more questions or requests? How about some more God?”

  When my finger was on top, it blocked the light from the bar. When it was off, the old fork shone dully.

  “Hmm? Nobody has any profundities?”

  Shine. No shine. On and off.

  He must have been looking at what I was doing because, when he spoke again, his voice was irritated. “What are you doing? Remember your mother telling you not to play with the silverware?”

  “Winning.”

  “What?”

  On and off. Light and no light. “I’m winning, Leland. I’ve won.”

  “Really? What are you winning, Alien?” His voice was amused.

  “This.” I held it up and, still not looking at him, turned the fork in the air so that the light went across it at every angle. Then I looked. He was sitting with his arms folded
over his chest, smiling.

  “Hit me, sweetie. I’m ready for your revelation. This time you’ll get your Oscar. Roll ‘em.”

  I would not look at Wyatt because I was scared that if his face said anything wrong it would throw me, and I couldn’t have that happen now.

  “I figured it out. I don’t know when, but I figured it out. It may have been what Uschi was doing in the hospital with the little windmill. Or Wyatt’s story about his father or even… or even because of what I felt for you before. It wasn’t the earth; it wasn’t seeing the earth, although that helped.

  “Leland, you’re so wrong. And that’s what’s pathetic about you, power and all.

  “Are you the Devil? Or only Death? Or something else? I don’t care. No matter what you are, you’re jealous. You’re jealous of every human being who has ever lived on earth. Know why? Because you’ve got limits and we don’t. With all the power you have and all the fear you put in us, there’s really only one thing you can do and that’s to scare us. You have your infinity of ways to do it, but that’s all. I remember reading that Lucifer fell from Heaven not because he challenged God, but because God told him to worship man and he wouldn’t. I know why He told you to worship us. Because we have the capacity to create and forget.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m very creative.”

  “Yes, but in only one thing, which has a lot of variations. If we make pictures or bake cakes or fall in love, we can do the same things you do—use them to create chaos and sadness. Look what you did to me and Emmy.

  “But you’re limited, Leland, and that’s the whole point. Just when you’ve taken everything in the world away from someone like Uschi, there she is in bed playing with light and totally absorbed in it. If you had come into the room at that moment, she wouldn’t have recognized you. And you know that’s the truth. You don’t know what it is to be absorbed. You can kill her but you can never know the feeling of loss she had in that light. It’s beyond you. That’s why God, whatever He is, wanted you to worship us. But you didn’t understand. Just by something as little as moving a finger back and forth like this.” I moved my finger on the fork. “You hate us so much because there really are times when we completely forget you. Forget the pain and the loss…