The Angel's Cut

  ‘Hello,’ said Xas, ‘it’s me.’ He peered at her, searchingly.

  ‘Your bag and parcel are in your room.’

  ‘I left them here before I went to the studio,’ he said. ‘I still had my key.’

  ‘When you left you must have had only your key, and the clothes on your back.’

  He went past her, into the bedroom at the back of the house. She switched off the radio and heard him unzip his bag. He reappeared with a suit on a hanger and went into the bathroom, saying, ‘This has been folded for weeks. Steam sometimes works.’ The shower went on. He crossed the hall again and emerged with a brown paper parcel, which he put into her hands.

  The parcel held a white silk shawl embroidered with red roses and tangles of green thorns. He said, ‘There was a Czech woman who lived off my courtyard in Berlin, and did fine embroidery.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Flora said. She wrapped the shawl around her.

  He reached out and freed her hair, spread it on her shoulders.

  ‘I’m thinking of cutting it,’ she said. ‘I’ve resisted a bob for ages, but I’m so busy these days, and it’s such a lot of trouble to take care of.’

  ‘I can perhaps make a difference to your busyness. Not that that’s a plea for your hair.’ He went back to the bathroom and shut off the shower.

  She raised her voice to say, ‘So, you’re going to start mending, cleaning, and cooking again?’

  He re-emerged. ‘Do you mind?’

  Flora was surprised to find herself feeling awkward, and a little repulsed, not by anger or dislike, but as if they were magnets that had come into oppositional contact. ‘No,’ she said, then, ‘How is Cole?’

  Xas raised one eyebrow, and turned his head from her.

  Flora felt dismissed. She drifted away into her kitchen and began making coffee. She called out to ask him if he wanted something to eat. There was a delay in his response, not absent-minded or impolite but, she felt, one that was supposed to allow for her to revise her invitation. Then, ‘No thank you,’ he said.

  He must know she’d guessed that Cole had tried to kill him. Cole must have given away at least that much. Was he waiting for her to say something?

  She put the workings in her percolator, then changed her mind about coffee and left the element beneath the pot unlit. ‘I take it you saw Helen Hope?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘For the deaf children?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you for remembering. For making the effort. For asking me to come back.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said.

  ‘That Helen Hope was a little like you,’ Xas said.

  Flora came out of her kitchen and glared at him. ‘You’re kidding! That do-gooder?’

  ‘Up till now all Crow’s heroines have been fatalistic, exhausted and asexual. I was never sure if they were his ideal woman, or a portrait of someone he loved.’

  ‘They’re like his wife. Or his idea of her.’

  ‘Helen was a little like you,’ he said again.

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘Though you’ve always been fatalistic, Flora, so that’s no change.’

  ‘That’s what I let everyone think,’ she said, dry. ‘Actually I have a plan. Or I’m open to the possibility of one.’

  They were standing a little apart, and there was anger in their interaction, Flora felt, though she knew she was very glad to see him. She wasn’t angry; so maybe it was him. She asked, ‘Are you angry at me?’

  ‘What reason would I have?’

  Flora flushed and looked away. She began to babble. ‘I’ve put you in the wrong room. It’s always damp in there. You’d be better off in the other.’

  ‘Millie’s,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I just put you back where you were before. I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘I’ll move my bag,’ he said. He stood and gazed at her for a long time, then went to the bedroom where he could be heard stuffing the clothes he’d taken out of his bag back into it. He crossed the hall to the room Millie had occupied for the months they had all lived together. Flora listened to the sound of drawers slide in and out and his too-soft footfalls moving back and forth across the room. He reappeared and asked her for a bar of soap to grease the sides of a stuck drawer.

  When he came back after seeing to the drawer he settled on her window seat. He said, ‘You look uncomfortable.’ He pushed up the sash, then lay down and folded his hands on his chest.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Flora snapped. ‘You’re being evasive. I asked you about Cole.’

  ‘Cole isn’t representative, is he?’

  This remark puzzled Flora. It wasn’t at all what she’d expected. She said, ‘In what way?’

  ‘He’s unrepresentative of people. When we first met he said to me, “I’m not people. Not folk”. But at the time I only thought he was boasting about his talent.’

  ‘Cole’s odd, through and through,’ said Flora.

  ‘His only interest in things is in how they concern him. Is a thing useful to him, or is it a threat.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Flora, and then got stuck herself. An application of dry soap would be no help to her.

  Xas said, ‘We talked about the trouble we had. How he couldn’t figure me out and started telling himself stories in which I was poisonous and a liability. We talked. My explanation—or my demonstration of it—cleared things up some. But he didn’t ask me any questions. When we were back in town and on his home territory I thought he’d feel safer. I tried then to tell him a little about myself and he just sat in silence, smirking, as if what I was saying was an imposition, or painful in some way. As if he was being very forbearing and I was being gauche. So I shut up. Then, as soon as he was comfortable again he did what he always does, he started to talk about what he was up to. His plans.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘He owns all the farm land around the golf course next to Mines Field. The county wants his land to build a bigger airfield. He stands to make a lot of money. He wants to buy an airline. It’s on his to-do list.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Flora, who had thought Cole’s plans might have been influenced by the momentous things Xas had told him. ‘That must have been discouraging for you,’ she said.

  ‘It was horrible. It wasn’t as if he disbelieved me. It was just that the me I was revealing to him—and offering him some custodianship of—was irrelevant to the point of non-existence.’

  ‘What was it you told him?’ Flora asked.

  Xas reached with his foot for the cord of the bamboo blind. He caught it between his toes and pulled it out so that the blind rattled down, releasing all the dust caught between its slats.

  Flora went to him, tapped his legs to get him to make room, and settled, supported in the curve of his body. She said, ‘Are you ever going to tell me?’ She picked up his hand.

  ‘Cole likes to have sex with me. So, I can make it up to him. I can make up in that way for what I am. For the impenetrable, stony, irrelevance of what I am.’

  ‘Look at me,’ Flora said. He did. His expression was a little bleak, but mostly blank. She said, ‘You just told me that Cole wasn’t representative. Maybe I am. You can tell me anything. I have faith in you. I know you’re good.’

  This last remark provoked a look of pain. It was faint and fleeting, but Flora saw it. Xas made a companionable, noncommittal noise, and his voice was even lovelier without words, and when his mouth was closed. Flora stroked his silky hair. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But you should trust me.’

  Flora thought, ‘Is he sparing me?’ And she thought, ‘Am I testing him?’ Finally she thought, ‘Is this any way to behave?’

  Venice, and the Wilshire Country Club

  January, 1932

  A couple of months after he’d moved back into Flora’s house, Xas was coming home one morning, at around three. He’d been with Cole, and hadn’t showered. He was tacky, reeking, sated, but depressed. He’d caught the streetcar that came up Pacific Avenue, not the one that stopped on the Venic
e shore. He was taking the long way home, thinking.

  He was on a dark stretch of road, at a point equidistant between two streetlights, when he heard the whistle of wind through long pinions. Without looking back, he dropped down onto the tarmac.

  Lucifer swooped, and missed him. Didn’t just miss, but miscalculated. As Xas dropped, Lucifer followed him down.

  An eagle that lands on a rabbit uses its momentum to carry the rabbit away. It dives, drives its talons through furry skin into flesh, then lifts off again. Lucifer must have aimed to do something like that—seize Xas and push off from gravity by vaulting up from the springy divot of the angel’s upright body, taking that body with him. But Xas ducked, and Lucifer extended his reach, and, because angels always had the lazy habit of not troubling too much to correct movements that might result in collisions—for collisions, though painful, never had ongoing consequences—when Lucifer’s snatch missed he was too low, and going too fast, to correct his position. The tips of his long top wings came into contact with the ground, and he flipped and tumbled, limbs thumping the tarmac, pinions popping, a momentous tangle of flesh and feathers.

  The archangel skidded and rolled the whole length of road to the next streetlight.

  As for Xas—Xas had ducked only from reflex. He hadn’t a hope of eluding his brother. He straightened and continued along the road, his shadow preceding him, for a car had appeared behind him.

  The archangel was sorting himself out. He rose, unfurled his wings and flexed them gently.

  The car’s brakes squealed and its headlights slewed away. It stopped, slant on to the kerb. Its driver emerged and stood in a patch of radiance from a street lamp, eyes shaded with one hand, peering.

  It was a quiet street. On its left the houses backed onto a canal. Beside Xas was a hedge with an arched opening, a white-painted gate, and a sign advertising the services of a piano teacher. For a desperate moment the angel imagined that, beyond that gate, there might be somewhere to hide.

  But Lucifer simply stood waiting, and Xas came on, step by hesitant step.

  When he was finally within reach, Lucifer seized Xas under his arms, crouched, and sprang away from the ground. Xas looked down past his helpless, dangling feet to watch the road recede, an illuminated strip of smooth tarmac. He saw the greenish flares of lawns, torched by houselights, the glossy black thread of the canal, the beachfront and boardwalk, the crowns of phoenix palms. He saw shop awnings, strings of coloured lights, lamps on ships moored off the coast. He saw the wasteland smeared with the thick shadows of live oak windbreaks, bright water flashing in its reed beds. He saw the peninsula, the oilfields’ glow, the oatmeal-textured, weed-choked waterways. The flat tarpaper roof of a church passed beneath them, a pledge written there, meant to be read by God, or by pilots flying inland: Christ the Lord is King.

  Lucifer didn’t move his grip to take hold of Xas with any of his wing hands, even when he caught an updraft and was gliding, only steering himself by tilting the flight feathers of his top wings, the others spread out around him. The archangel’s glide was slow, he almost floated rather than flew, and still he kept Xas at arm’s length, carrying him as gingerly as a small child might a kitten.

  Xas’s hands were free, though, and he took hold of what he could reach, as if in fear of falling. He wrapped one hand around the steely striated muscle above the archangel’s right elbow; the other grabbed a hank of Lucifer’s gritty, knotted hair.

  Not a word passed between them. It was silent in the air, the wind in the archangel’s feathers making just enough noise to mask any sounds rising from the world below. They hung above the Hollywood Hills until Lucifer chose where to land, where he perhaps judged they might be undisturbed. He began to descend and Xas made out patches of green, like blankets pulled as taut as trampolines between regularly placed lights. He saw velvety grass lawns and woolly green treetops, the warm scales of terracotta tiled roofs, two opalescent illuminated swimming pools and, further from the buildings, dark lawns under the humped mists of sprinkler spray. Xas wasn’t sure at the time where it was they came down. Later he worked out that they had landed on a green at the Wilshire Country Club.

  The archangel dropped Xas a moment before touching down himself. Xas’s boots made deep prints on the soaked green. They stayed where they landed, neither of them moving to get out from under the veil of sprinklers. The water beaded on the archangel’s wings, then began to run in rivulets. It tapped on Xas’s dry jacket, till the leather grew sodden and heavy. They faced one another—and God was there too, in the faintly lit mists, the ticking sounds the turf made as it drank, the sizzle of spray.

  Lucifer said, ‘You’ve given up taking your short cut.’

  ‘I’ve been away, why should I take up all my old habits?’

  ‘You’ve resumed living with your friend, that woman, and sleeping with some man—is it Conrad Cole?—the man whose smell is all over you. The only thing you’ve given up is your short cut.’

  Xas’s wet rattails dripped onto his nose. ‘I’ve expected this,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting. Flora told me that someone had asked after me. Someone who left her anonymous notes, including one message inscribed on an awning torn from a shop front.’

  Lucifer smiled, and Xas imagined running away across the squelching ground. He saw himself doing it. He would disappear beyond the lights around the arena of the green. The trees surrounding the green were elms, tall, though they had looked low from the air. There was a stable somewhere nearby, for Xas heard a horse whicker, and another answer it. Dignity didn’t matter between him and God. So he would run, he’d pick up his feet and go. Perhaps the horses were housed in a stone building, behind doors with strong bolts. Perhaps their stalls were narrow and deep; too deep for an archangel to reach into.

  Lucifer waited, his wings silvered by running water, calm, and beautiful with some kind of surety more personal and permanent to him in that moment even than the presence of his Father. ‘There’s something I want to ask you, Xas,’ he said.

  ‘All right. Go on. Get it over with,’ Xas said.

  The archangel said, ‘I want to know why you think I cut off your wings.’

  ‘I’ll tell you, then you’ll lie to me.’

  Lucifer’s forehead creased with perplexity. ‘I know you’ve immersed yourself in the local traditions, but is it really necessary for you to go so far as to suppose I always lie?’ Then, ‘Ask me why I cut off your wings.’

  ‘You cut off my wings so that Sobran could keep me,’ Xas said. ‘That’s what you told him. And God let you do it because I’d offended Him. My lack of chastity was blasphemous. Because I’m a copy—a copy of that other one.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Lucifer, then he smiled and said, ‘Since you’re still being unchaste perhaps I should cut off something else.’

  Xas’s body remained motionless in the steady chilling spray, but his mind seemed to sidle away. He didn’t want to think about why They’d chosen to maim him—God and Lucifer. He must find something to say to stop Lucifer telling him.

  He removed his jacket and tossed it out of the range of the sprinklers. The drops began to soak his cotton shirt, so that a transparency seeped from his shoulders down. He said, ‘Whatever reasons you had, I don’t know how relevant they are now. You see, once my wings had gone, and I was on earth all the time, for maybe forty years things went on as they always had, then, gradually, many new things began to appear. For instance, there were multiple copies of books, and mass-produced clothes—the sorts of stuff manufactured by speedy machinery. So—say—a new zinc bucket would weigh less than an old wooden one, and could carry more apples, so the wooden bucket wasn’t mended and was finally thrown away.’

  ‘I’m being patient,’ Lucifer said, ‘but I’m missing your point. To go with your wood versus zinc analogy—God might seem to disappear, but would be growing again somewhere like the timber for a wooden bucket. He’s always there, whatever shape He takes.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ Xas said, ‘
though it’s an interesting thought.’ He heard the horses again, whickering nervously to one another. They reminded him of something he’d noticed. He said, ‘There were five years in which the hundreds of thousands of horses in Paris reduced in number to only a few hundred, because of automobiles. I lived through all those different disappearances and changes, and I kept changing too, even after that first alteration.’

  Lucifer frowned at him. ‘Are you trying to say that your wings weren’t taken but simply disappeared, like the Parisian horses? That there was no violence, only an “alteration”?’

  Xas was silent.

  ‘Are you trying to say that since the world has moved on, in effect you’re no longer the one whose wings were cut off?’

  Xas said, ‘I know and feel many new things now. Nothing wonderful or exclusive. But what I feel is like—well—my shirt.’

  ‘You feel like your shirt?’ Lucifer said. His mouth stayed a little open. His face relaxed completely and Xas was distracted by a hitherto unnoticed family resemblance. Lucifer looked like Michael.

  Xas shook his head to clear it. He touched the fully transparent material under his collar, which was showing the dark cartilage of its celluloid stiffening. ‘This is a shirt, the same as other shirts,’ he said, ‘and the library books waiting for me on Flora’s window seat are the same books that are in many other hands. Scarcely anything is made specially any more—books copied for one reader, a shirt tailored for one body. Nothing I’ve learned lately is special, but it was bound to make other stuff vanish, as horses vanished from the streets of Paris.’

  Lucifer said, ‘Are you saying that you’re going to start forgetting things, including what happened to you? Including how it felt to fly? Angels don’t forget. This is all wishful thinking, Xas. If God is a horse He’s also an automobile, and you can’t make either of us vanish or recede merely by filling yourself with what this overproducing world has to offer.’

  ‘Vanish,’ Xas echoed, softly, as if performing a rather wistful exorcism.

  Lucifer dropped his chin again, and again the tension drained away from his face. He no longer looked at all formidable. He said, ‘Why did I cut off your wings?’