FOUR – PAIN IS WHAT THE ANGEL FELT

A quarter mile from the Caverns and from Ausine’s cluttered cubby hole, I turned around when I remembered the wine. The light was still on when I arrived, and Ausine informed me that he had been on his way to bed. Five more minutes, he said, and I wouldn’t have been treated to a response, much less the cheap bottle of Pinot Grigio he graciously supplied me. A pat on my shoulder, a wink of his eye, and I felt his hand slip past my ribcage and slide something into my jacket pocket.

“You left that, too.” He said, closing the door softly. I touched the bulge in my jacket and found Fial’s wallet a little half-heartedly. Maybe I had wished that, by sharing his presence with another soul, I had somehow lessened his burden on my own. But when I walked all the miles back to my house by the airstrip, he’d be all mine, all over again. I slipped the Pinot Grigio into my other pocket, and set off with a slightly heavier step than before.

In the Caverns, walking all alone, I took the time to evaluate my own position in the grand scheme of existentialism. If I were attacked, walking down the cobblestone earth floor to the Locust Street Exit, I’d certainly fight for my life. But why? Was it the thrill of needing to know what would happen tomorrow? The survivalist instinct to avoid pain and suffering? Or was it just that I would feel supremely cheated if, after all this time, I weren’t treated to a front row seat when the ruins of Valeyria finally crumbled and the streets ran thick with survivors’ blood?

Probably the latter.

Sighing with suppressed relief, I ascended the steel stairwell into the bone-chilling air. Locust Street was once a hub of traffic, three lanes wide in both directions, flanked by narrow sidewalks that I remembered being crowded straight from nine a.m. until late evening. I watched a discarded newspaper page skid noisily across the six ghostly lanes, stopping only when the wind tossed it against the brick edifice of the former Locust Street Savings and Loan. I looked up at the building and wanted to see the Christmas lights again.

Every building downtown, every winter, would be strung with Christmas lights in patterns both erratic and divinely perfect. From one roof to the other, fifty feet above our heads, strings of little white shining things would hang suspended as if by the magic no one at that time wanted to think about too much. Valeyria was always decorated in white, during the holidays. We’d gotten one more Christmas before the bomb dropped, a beautiful season I could only appreciate in retrospect. The Locust Street Savings and Loan, tallest of the old buildings in the upscale downtown district, would always look like a birthday cake iced in twinkling lights. I used to sit on the bench across the street, the wrought iron bench on the curb where Locust Street intersected with Harnais, and watch the matrix of alternating blinks.

By my best assumption, it was November now. Already it felt like the coldest day of January. I found myself worrying again about the stranger. Soon the Caverns would be a battlefield of bodies begging for shelter. Soon we’d have to fight each other for survival or surrender ourselves to the elements.

As I ignored the bleeding sores on my feet and focused on Ausine’s words, I realized that I was going to fight. Maybe not for Valeyria, but for myself. And, an inexplicable itch in my brain told me, for Fial.

~*~

The wind whispers a strange song over the asphalt by the airport, where great spans of concrete plains make a prarie for the air to dance its mad waltz of freedom. I listened to it whistle through the destitute branches of the dying sycamores, their dry limbs snapping one by one and making music until the death. There had been a garden around my home, before. It had been a grand little home for some small, lucky family, probably sold at a meager price for being so close to the airport, but fashionable nonetheless. Now a few dried leaves still crunched under my feet; the ones that had waited until the rains were passed to fall. They had no choice but to dry into dust. When those leaves cracked under my steps, they sounded like tiny bones shattering against the concrete. I took care to keep my ears on the symphony of the mad wind, and away from the leaves on the mildewed sidewalk.

The Pinot Grigio swung heavily against my leg. I was very near my home when it started to rub uncomfortably there, weighing down on my left side a trifle too much. I was tired, and confused. Time to think and time to sleep were two separate distinctions for me, and I would unfortunately have to put aside the contemplation for another day. If Nangi waited for me, my evening would be spent socializing. No doubt the stranger would require some moments with me to spout his cryptic rhetoric, and then I would fall into slumber.

But Nangi was not waiting. It was unusual, but not unheard of, for the Snake to break a date. She did not thrive on punctuality and appointment as I did, and lived her live by a wing and a prayer rather than a schedule. “In a perfect world,” she attempted to expound one night in my company, “we wouldn’t have the capacity to think too far ahead. The agony of anticipation and the stress of worry would be eliminated.” I asked her, in logical turn, if we should then be able to remember. She avoided the question, saying it was irrelevant. I considered her perfect world for only a moment before it failed to resolve itself in the structures of my mind.

Yet, perhaps it might be best if, in Valeyria, we weren’t allowed to consider the future. No matter what Ausine said.

I decided to consider the present instead. I considered Nangi at home, wrapped in her patchwork sheets and scribbling with nibs of old pencils on warped notebook paper. She was happy although she was dying, to be well taken care of by her employers and to be writing poetry on a frightening night of howling winds.

I yawned when I climbed the steps to the front door, finding the wrought iron railing stinging with more cold than usual. There would be no snow this terrible winter, no Christmas lights; only killing winds and things hardened by cold. I hurried a bit quicker than usual into the shelter of my home.

My senses were keen to things of a preternatural state, even at my adult level of development. Psychic powers fade, but leave a residual set of instincts that pulse very softly beneath the surface of a normal sensory experience. I had the most skill with my surroundings. I sensed when people were near. By simply standing in the lobby of a building, I could estimate how many people were roaming the halls. It was a skill that seemed only mildly characteristic of the Ganie, to me. Nothing more than keen senses mixed with an uncanny knack for proportion and depth.

Therefore, whenever I walked into my home it still took a few moments to adjust to the feeling of another body. The stranger had taken his silent strain on my routine, my life, though I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I hadn’t lied to Ausine, and I had become a bit fond of this Fial character. It seemed I might not mind having him as a houseguest, after all.

But this night, this cold and contemplative night, I couldn’t shake the feeling as I strode through the antechamber to the stairwell, that another presence accompanied him on the second floor.

I heard them before I even reached the stairwell; sound travels well in the old, airy house, and I had little choice but to stand, stunned and eavesdropping, as I was plunked into the middle of an established conversation.

“Why do you not believe in God, Nangira?”

“I don’t like this topic, you understand.”

“I understand quite fully. But please explain. You said you were raised in churches, even though you were of the mystic races.”

“Yes. My father never forgave himself for being with my mother. I was like a constant reminder of what he called a sin. He said she was a woman of trickery, who never gave any indication that she was not a decent worshipper.”

Christianity, as well as Judaism and all the factions of both, had faded into an amalgam of church-and-God based religions decades earlier. Somehow holy war was mostly wiped out, probably with the advent of the mystical races upon the general societies. They called us heathens and so had a reason to band together under a common flag of the church. We called them Worshippers.

“Did he love you?”

I could hear Nangira’s indignant snort. “He forced me to live a life of repentance. It is for that I have chosen to loathe the church. I was innocent. My only crime was belonging to my race while also wading half-hearted in the gene pool of his. It wasn’t until he died that I was able to strike out on my own, at that time abandoning all he had taught me.”

He allowed her to pause, asking no more until she continued of her own pleasure.

“When he beat me, and I complained of the pain, he would recite to me a verse from the mythology he held so dear.”

I already knew the verse of which she spoke. A tapestry of history and legend had combined to form a mythology which the monotheist worshippers invested much attention in. The stories had always captivated me, but the literalist fervor with which they defended them weighed on even my, quite literalist, heart.

I recited the verse under my breath along with her.

“Pain is what the angel felt, dead against the waking dawn.”

It was here that I felt the need to interrupt.

“You’ll tire that story out, you tell it so much.” I entered calmly, betraying my own agitation at the situation.

Nangi wheeled around in her position, sitting on the edge of the bed next to The Stranger. Her red locks bounced around her head and her smoky eyes grew twice their size, her expression like that of a child caught in some heinous act.

“Ontameni!” She nearly shrieked. Her capacity for shock was much greater than mine.

I crossed my arms and surveyed the scene. Fial sat rather serene, looking at me and prepared to offer a testimony in Nangi’s defense.

“She saw the light in the window,” I’d given him candles to burn while he was awake, “I guess she saw my silhouette—“

“I thought someone was trying to rob you.” She nearly pleaded, although I had not voiced my displeasure yet. She knew. Her yellow eyes saw right through my stoicism and pulled out the indignation. I thought it would be moot to show too much of it; moot and illogical. Nangi already looked like a hurt puppy, and I took no thrill in adding to that. She was a person who had been in this place too many times in the past.

“What would they take?” I breathed, walking past the bed. I removed Fial’s wallet from my pocket and tossed it. It landed near him, “I don’t have anything of value, and they’d have to brave the basement to find my money.” I kept a deposit of several hundred dollars in the half-flooded basement, just in case. My nature was never to touch the things I set aside on purpose, and so the money had been out of sight and out of mind for months.

I looked down and noticed Fial. He glanced from me, to the wallet, and back again, his eyebrows bowing in curiosity. I took the wine out, set it on the dresser, and collapsed into the rocking chair, rubbing my temples. “I’m sorry, I had to try and find out who you were. I took your wallet to someone who might know.”

“Thank you,” he said, his voice small. He reached out with his delicate, porcelain fingers and retrieved it. Nangi watched his every inch of movement, following his gestures like a sniper, “I’d like to know as much as you would.”

“Yes, I would imagine so,” I sighed, “unfortunately, he knew nothing.”

“Now I see what you were so reluctant to tell me in the bar.” Nangi cast her eyes down at the floor, afraid to look at me when I sounded so troubled.

“And don’t you see why?”

“Why you were so reluctant?” she asked rhetorically. One of her hands rested on the rise of Fial’s leg, and she smiled gently at him before turning her attention back to me, “not really. It might have done him good to have someone else to talk to. You’re a bit of a bore.”

“Her analysis, not mine.” Fial offered before I was able to respond. I almost appreciated the small consolation.

“My personality, and his comfort, have nothing to do with this. The greatest stretch of hospitality I could imagine in the first place was offering him a place to stay,” I nestled deep into the chair and tried to furrow my brow, but the truth is that I was in the presence of two people who had an uncanny way about cutting my defenses. I cleared my throat and softened my tone, “Ausine thinks there may be some security issues involved. Concerning Valeyria.”

Nangi invested little faith in the conspiracy theories, and knew better than to take anything Ausine said at face value. “Does Ausine have any proof to back this up?”

“No,” I sighed, “but the story seems almost unbelievable. Stranger in a dying land, doesn’t remember who he is, suddenly rendered immobile…you know the sort of things they’re capable of out there.”

“Do you think someone would try to destroy Valeyria, Ontameni?” Fial asked, when it became obvious that Nangi had no more to contribute to the discussion of mere theories.

“Someone already did.” I remarked immediately.

“Do you know that for sure?” He replied.

I remained silent. Nangi became suddenly interested once more. Her head rose slowly, as did her voice. “You know…he’s right…we are conspicuously ignorant about how or why this bomb fell on us. Hell…we don’t even know it was a bomb. It might’ve been a misfire, from the military base, or some national security thing.”

“Anything is possible, I suppose.” Logically, anything was a possibility, but faith wanted me to believe that it didn’t work in such ironic ways.

We all allowed ourselves, then, to lose the discussion to contemplation for several moments. I in my rocking chair, and Nangi perched sullenly on the edge of the bed, where Fial watched us both, observing and anticipating.

Nangi gasped suddenly; a soft, pert little gasp that suggested some female modesty rather than any sort of shock. I glanced up and saw Fial’s hand on her arm, turning it sideways, moving the loose ribbons of ripped brown fabric aside to inspect her well-scarred skin. “These marks…” he began flatly, his tone blocked by some knowing respect, “do they hurt you?”

She moved her arm away gently; Nangi was not easily offended, and I doubted that Fial’s question had served to do anything but depress her. He let go of the bony little limb easily, and she crossed it over the other on her chest, huddling deep into a slump as she sighed and responded. “Not really. They bleed every now and then, when they’re new, but luckily it’s rarely my blood that’s lost.”

“Oh,” he replied, not particularly surprised. I’d always been certain that he knew even my secrets, “so that is what Ontameni does for you. It’s a shame, to marr your skin, though.” He looked aside and out the window, watching the desolate airstrip again.

“I know.” Nangi whispered.

I decided to leave as abruptly as I had decided to interrupt their conversation. “It’s cold outside. Nangi, don’t walk home. You can stay here,” it was something she was used to doing, on nights when she was too weak or otherwise frightened to walk five miles alone, “as for you—“ I pointed to Fial in passing. He raised his eyebrows curiously, a bit challenging, at me, “—we’ll have to relocate soon. We’re not staying in this house for the winter. I’m taking you to a friend of mine in the Caverns.”

“Ausine?” Nangi asked quietly, used to my brusqueness.

“Yes.” I left the room silently, content not to think any more about Nangi and her scars or Fial and his questions. Even Ausine’s theories, which had made sense a few hours ago, dissipated when I stepped into the sanctuary of my room. I turned the door shut behind myself, and fished a nub of chalk from the shallow pocket on my coat. With a slow stroke I marked another day off on the back of the door, where I had been trying to keep track of the days since I had moved in. I couldn’t imagine myself getting attached to any of this, but somehow I didn’t want to leave the sanctuary of my room, where the blanket of personality protected me. I didn’t want to leave the string of Christmas lights I’d strung up above my bed, even if they didn’t work without electricity, even if I could only stare at them in the mornings and remember the patterns of lights I used to watch on Locust Street.

I could hear Fial and Nangi begin talking again, several minutes after I had left. They spoke more quietly this time, considerate of the fact that I was sleeping, or at least trying to. I didn’t listen too carefully to the vibrations of the conversation; I didn’t feel any particular need to. It was strange how I already trusted Fial to be alone with Nangi, but even stranger was that I trusted him enough ot be kind to me in my absence.