40, page 11
The light came down from the clouds. Or maybe up from the ground. We couldn’t tell. We watched the light for a time to see if it would shift or recede or give some clue to its origin. Then Nalli Sandoval stepped out behind us.
“Do you know what that is?” I asked her. “The light?”
The actress glumly grinned. “It’s for you, angel.”
We drove out through the city. I sat across from Nalli, who was distant and poured herself a glass of champagne though it wasn’t yet noon. She’d not elaborated on the light. She hadn’t said she’d come to take me, or that she’d been asked to take me, but instead said her orders were to take me. She couldn’t say why or where, only adding it would be a tremendous surprise.
Heading west through downtown, we came upon a checkpoint of barricades and armed guards. The car slowed, but didn’t stop, as the Pearl guards parted and a gate was raised. For as far as I could see down the cross street’s curving corridor, the road was split down the stripe by a security fence topped with concertina wire.
“What’s the fence for?” I asked.
Champagne glass to her lip, Nalli peered out her window, eyes lifted as to see the tops of the buildings. “The city center is just for dignitaries now.”
“Am I not a dignitary?”
“You’re much more than that.”
The car rushed us out of the shadows of skyscrapers and into the sunshine of the valley. The light that had been a thin bar when viewed from the penthouse grew clearer as we neared, now not like a single band of light, but hundreds of lights making one radiant chute, milky and roiling like spotlights shone through smoke.
We turned onto a long road through land devoid of structures. The car slowed as the road bumped from asphalt onto gravel and wound through a nature preserve of broom sedge and hardwoods, a white egret standing in the green water of a marsh, two white deer in the shade of an elm.
The chute of light marked a plateau atop a hill high above us. Wide and whirling, it was a massive silo of crackling vaporous energy. At the base of the hill’s slope, we stopped at a chain-link gate. Nalli got out and crossed to a little guard station. Not a minute later she returned to the car, trailed by a team of Pearl in tac vests, white helmets, and masks, with carbines in their hands.
Nalli climbed back into the limousine. The soldiers surrounded the vehicle and jogged beside the car as the slope steeply rose. The car climbed its way to the top, then parked on the flat earthen shelf before a curved wall of aspen.
The trunks of the trees white and perfectly straight, plasma-like air eddied up through the golden-leafed branches, the tops of which seemed to be emitting the churning light that created the barrier’s shell and extended seamlessly up into the clouds.
Nalli patted my knee. “From here we walk.”
“Walk to where?”
“It’s fine,” she said, with an unconvincing grin. “Come now.”
The Pearl in position around us, Donta closer still, Nalli and I crossed through a gated pass between the aspen trunks and onto a path mowed through the tawny grasses and white flowers of an enormous meadow that glowed under the vortex’s ethereal light.
The aspen encircled the meadow, at the center of which stood a magnificent hulking tree, twice as tall as the tallest aspen, and wide with shimmering leaves not gold like autumn, but twinkling like coins in the twisting white-barked limbs that made roost for hundreds of white birds.
I realized I’d seen this plateau and meadow while flying to survey the valley, the tree having then been covered under scaffolding and tarp. As we walked nearer to the tree, my pulse surged as I noted the house perched high in the tree’s crotch.
My heart a trapped bird thrashing, I glared at Nalli for explanation. This wasn’t just any house. This was my home, the little stone house in which I was raised, as if it’d been swept by flood off the mountainside and settled by providence into these glittering branches in this meadow of uncanny light.
Timid and contrite, Nalli said, “Welcome home, angel.”
4
I WAS TO LIVE IN MY CHILDHOOD HOME, in a storybook tree, on a plateau encased in the cone of miasmic light. During their orientation, the Novae would come as pilgrims to bear homage to Seraphine, the Angel of 40. The meadow was consecrated ground, the tree a temple. This was what Nalli explained to me.
“But that’s just during the day. At night, you can relax in the house or even explore the land,” the actress said, as if awarding me a prize. “The entire meadow is yours.”
I tried to remain composed, there in the living room where I’d spent years of mornings eating breakfast, evenings doing homework, the room not sodden in disrepair as I’d last seen it, the wood floors now dry and polished, the walls unstained and intact.
There sat Mama’s work brogans on the mat beside the door. There sat the tattered couch on which I’d read countless novels, Mama’s books now neatly filed back on their shelves. There on the wall hung the barnyard photo of Mama on a hay bale, Ava Lynn on her lap, me standing tall behind Mama’s shoulder.
I gazed out the front window, what normally would look out over our gravel drive and the hillside road, but now looked out into tree limbs shimmering in the silo’s watery light, the golden leaves flashing, the white branches nesting white birds with tail feathers like magpies and thorny beaks like those of a sandpiper.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
“It’s not forever.” Nalli stepped beside me in the window’s lambent glow. “Once the Novae have completed their orientation, the meadow will be yours. The barrier is just here for your protection. It’ll be lifted once we can ensure your safety. Then you won’t even have to live in this house. They’ll build you anything you want. You can have a mansion, a high-rise, whatever your heart desires. And Jo Sam sent word that if you give us these few short weeks, he’ll reunite you and Ava Lynn, for you all to live here for as long as you’d like. Think of it, Mazzy. No more struggle, all your needs taken care of, never a worry. Won’t that be wonderful?”
“My sister’s here? In the valley?”
The light through the branches raked gelatinous shadows across Nalli’s face. “Give us these few weeks, hon,” the actress said, her eyes confiding she could only say so much. “Just these few short weeks, then I swear she’ll be right here beside you.”
* * *
IN THE EVENING, the vortex dimmed and spread a lunar glaze over the meadow, the white flowers all the brighter in the faux moonlight. I could feel the ghosts of the house around me. I refused the haunts in my old bedroom, and lay under my cloak on the living room couch, listening to static hum that was the music of the sky.
Donta slept on a cot in the kitchen. She stayed with me until the pallid glow of dawn seeped through the limbs and roused the birds into squawking, at which point she shook my arm to see I was stirring, then left to her post at the base of the tree.
The initiates arrived on buses and passed into the meadow turning circles and training their awe upon the cylinder of light and the colossal golden-leafed tree. Nalli had told me I could move in the house as I pleased, sleep or read or cook, whatever I wanted, as the windows were tinted so the Novae couldn’t see inside.
A mica sconce was mounted above the front door. Once an hour, the amber light would shine as a signal for me to step out onto the stoop, which was now a veranda, and wave to the crowd below.
“Only for a minute,” Nalli had told me. “No need to speak. Just wave and smile. That’s all.”
Spying the meadow from the front window, I felt more than a little like an apparition, terrified that when the light turned on I’d step onto the veranda and the people wouldn’t see me at all. When the first amber light shone, the Novae acolytes in their gold tunics rushed the tree, crushing against the guarded barricade and wailing praise in such a manner I felt peril for us all.
Remove my wings, remove me from this sublime light and this house in the tree, and I’d be no different from them, yearning for someone to give meaning to my suffering. But I was the magician who knew the tricks of illusion. I waved to the crowd, knees trembling, teeth clenched behind my smile, then turned back into the house and wanted only to hide.
I hurried through the living room and to my bedroom in the rear of the house. Posters on the walls, horses and motorbikes, a red quilted bedspread that should have been tattered but was spotless and new. I needed something old and familiar, and opened my dresser and there lay my T-shirts and underthings. I took off my boots and pulled on the ragg wool socks I’d always worn on winter nights.
Ava Lynn’s room was just as pristine: the pink walls, the comforter with little tufts of yarn at the seams, and Mr. Otter atop her pillows. I clutched Mr. Otter to my chest and rushed into Mama’s room. Only in this room did the bed appear imperfect, a dent in the blankets as if someone had just risen from a nap.
I stepped to Mama’s closet and moved hanger by hanger through the blouses and pants. On a shelf above the hanging clothes I found the sweater, brown and aged into perfect softness, a patch for the United States Forest Service on the breast.
I pulled the sweater over my head and tugged the cotton down over my wings. Wings clamped against my back, I lay on Mama’s bed and closed my eyes to the light shimmering in from outside, my mind flooding with bittersweet memories of breakfasts for dinner, dancing with Mama to old records, Mama brushing my hair or reading stories to me by the light of a candle.
She’d been hard on me because she loved me. She was fierce and kind, the hardest worker I knew. She wasn’t a ghoul, not a harbinger of woe. She was sometimes wrong, but more often right. When right, she was beautifully correct. I lay in Mama’s bed, composing in my mind the eulogy she deserved but would never receive.
* * *
WHEREAS ON THE FIRST DAY I’d managed to answer the amber light hour upon hour, on the second day my body felt drained of its soul. Whereas on the first day I’d shouldered dogged fatigue, on the second day I was once again feverish, my wings shedding feathers. Whereas on the first day I’d reveled in memories of Mama, on the second day I felt only the irrevocable permanence of her absence.
The silo’s amoebic light ever shifting, the tree’s golden leaves winking, and the odd birds ceaselessly singing, I became disoriented, not just feeling that the place was manufactured, but that the same could be said for my childhood home and maybe even for me.
I lay on the couch and pulled the blanket over my head and didn’t care that I missed the day’s first amber light, and was surprised when no one, not even Donta, came to check on me.
Had I been a superhero in a film, I’d have found a way to free myself from this trap and find my sister. But I didn’t have superstrength, no magic hammer. I couldn’t control minds or shoot fire from my eyes. I was just a woman with wings, lonely and tired, and the only agency my wings had afforded me was to be up in that tree instead of down in the meadow with the Novae.
To salvage my sanity, I tried to lift my imagination out of that space. I remembered what Nalli had told me, and pondered what kind of house I could have them build for Ava Lynn and me.
I didn’t want some ostentatious glass house like Astoria. Didn’t want a grand lodge-style mansion like Nalli. What I imagined was an indestructible house, with walls of steel, stormproof windows, solar panels, and a gas- and wood-burning stove.
Details came to me in a flurry. Worried they’d slide from my memory, I rose to seek out pen and paper. In the kitchen drawer where Mama kept such things, I found a permanent marker. I searched the house for paper, but the closest I could find was an old damaged window shade in the back of the coat closet.
I cut a rectangle of white plastic from the shade, and sat on the commode in the windowless bathroom making my sketch, including dimensions and materials and placement of furniture, details scrawled in the margins, notes over every bit of white.
It wasn’t guilt over my duty to the Novae Terrae that made me answer the second amber light, but the thought that if I didn’t abide Jo Sam would keep Ava Lynn from me and we’d never live a day in the house I was constructing in my mind.
Out on the veranda, it may have appeared I was paying deference to the Novae below as I passed my gaze slowly over the meadow, when really I was scanning the land to discern where a house might best be founded.
* * *
IN THE DARKNESS before daybreak, on the third day in the house in the tree, I lay in Ava Lynn’s bed remembering her telling me a soul was everything that was you that wasn’t your body. I’d always been equally jealous and adoring of Ava Lynn. I worried that when we were reunited she’d be changed, her innocence tarnished, the trauma of being taken by the Pearl harming not her body but her soul.
Then the meadow’s first light brightened the room and I noted that the ceiling above the bed bore no cracks. I distinctly recalled Ava Lynn pretending the long crack from the corner of the room to the light fixture was a river in which Mr. Otter swam.
I sat up in the bed and studied the room. But for the absence of the crack in the ceiling, and the tidiness of the place, the room was how I remembered it. Yet it felt wrong. As if the room had lost its soul. Had they merely fixed the crack in the ceiling? Or was this a different ceiling?
I wandered searching out flaws in the replication, racking my brain on how to verify the house’s authenticity. I scrutinized the shoes under the beds, the linens in the hall closet, the pill bottles in the medicine cabinet. I even riffled through several novels to see that the pages held words.
In the kitchen, I stared at our heavy oak table and remembered the carvings. On my eleventh birthday, Dewey had gifted me a pocket knife. I’d crawled with him under the table and gouged into the wood the initial M, then added a +. Lemon icing from the cake in the corners of his lips, Dewey expectantly smiled, hoping for me to carve the letter D.
I knelt to inspect the underside of the table. The wood showed no marks. I hastened around the table, my fingertips not finding any indication of those old secret scratchings. I kicked away the chairs and overturned the table, but the wood grain was clean.
Then I knew this house was a clever but soulless fake. I wanted to smash that table, break all the dishes in the cupboard and tear down the walls, to burn the tree and burn the entire city. Shaking with rage, I had to get out of that doppelgänger space.
Though the amber sconce hung dark, I tore through the front room and out onto the veranda and leaped into flight. The Novae in the meadow gaped and called to me as I soared above them. I flew a high reckless circle, wanting to escape, to plunge through the silo’s barrier, but as I passed near, the electric wall crackled, its potent charge stinging my skin.
I looped back toward the center, Donta and the Pearl scrambling into the crowd that joyfully wailed. Something like sorrow coursed through me as I saw the reverence I held in their eyes. I barely contained the urge to scream that this was all a lie.
I descended to hover just out of grasp, the Novae leaping and howling as the Pearl swam through the throng to get to me. Then I glimpsed her, back near the gate in the aspen and away from the others, her wild red hair lit bronze in the swirling light.
Meera. It was Meera. I found myself swooping toward the baker.
Meera bashfully nodded as I landed before her, her lips quivering as she said hello. The crowd racing our way, I leaned near and pleaded, “Please, get me out of here. Please.”
Meera cinched her arms around me. “Easy now,” she said, and kissed my cheek. “Everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
The crumbling within my chest rose into my throat. The crowd converging, Donta shouting for everyone to stay back, I broke from the baker’s embrace and again took wing, lifting above the meadow, witness to all the upturned faces in the unsettled light, faces young and old wet with tears, crying out for want, crying out for need, weeping when I could not.
A MANTLE OF THUNDERHEADS clamped a lid over the silo. Raucous wind funneled down into the meadow, the house swaying in the tree, branches clacking the rooftop. I was collapsed on the couch after a long day with the Novae, watching the rain lash the windows, when the front door opened and the wet wind rushed over me and in strode Raja Garbos, a gold umbrella in one hand, a white rose in the other.
Donta stirred from the kitchen to intercept him, but he raised a hand as if to say her intervention wasn’t needed. “You have my apology,” the actor said, down to me. “It’s a blustery evening, I know, but I have my orders.”
“Orders?” I said.
“You are still a soldier, no?”
“What orders?”
“For you and I to go to dinner.”
“By whose command?”
Raja flashed an impish grin. “I am a captain, after all. I outrank you.”
The man was a fool. “Not tonight, Raja. I’m exhausted.”
His grin faltered and he tossed the rose down at my feet. “Again, I apologize, but the order isn’t really from me. It comes from the top. So if you’d be so kind as to get dressed.”
* * *
RAJA AND I SAT in a corner booth at Bistro Novum. Donta was at the nearest table, our only security, the restaurant’s rain-tracked windows blurring the street and reflecting the half-empty dining room. The actor talked on and on about the appearances he’d been making in various townships as Jo Sam’s herald.
“Enough about me,” he said, at last recognizing my disinterest in his prattle. “How have you been doing?”
How had I been doing? Why casually ask what couldn’t be easily answered? He was either insensibly shallow or his motives were corrupt. I let my silence speak my annoyance.
The quiet stretched into discomfort. Raja nervously traced lines into the condensation on his water glass, smiled, and said, “I really don’t know much about you. Your father, for example? I don’t know anything about your father.”
