The High Heaven, page 22
It’s only snakeshot, she said. Don’t worry. It’s fine. It’s probably only snakeshot. She fumbled around to get his shirt off.
I can feel myself leakin out.
Shut up. She got his shirt ripped off then pressed the wad of it onto his back. He shifted and moaned terribly from doing it but got to where he could see her face.
The spirit of ecstasy, said Abel.
You’re a fucking idiot, she said. I knew it from day one. The very beginning.
Abel smiled. At least now you can reach in there, he said. See if you can’t feel my wings. He closed his eyes and died. Izzy sat there a long while, her hand over the hole of his back.
—
Her stained coveralls soaked in the tub, the diamond studs long gone. She lay naked on the bed of a Motel 6 in Austin. There was a small pile of things she’d managed to pack and carry off after walking five miles back to the Rancho El Rae. She lay waiting for the sheriff who would surely come around to talk about the body in the Corniche. The sheriff would take her to some tribunal to answer for everything that had happened in her life plus other bad things in the world which were her fault though she hadn’t realized it yet. On the third day, when nobody had come knocking, she got up and wrung out her coveralls and hung them to dry. She repacked the things she’d salvaged: tapes from the Vidimagic, a few hundred bucks, a fifth of gin, the kookhound’s chart with her iris fortune sketched on the backside. She flipped the chart back and forth looking for an answer but when none materialized, she took a bus toward Eulogy then hitched the rest of the way to Camelot. Nobody had come around asking anything about her, so Izzy stayed awhile sleeping on yard sofas, getting deeper into gin than she ever had before, telling folks she didn’t know where Abel had run off to. In August, there was news of a plane crash at Dallas. Maybe the dead would be there walking as angels. On the bus, out the window she saw the flatness passing by and she tried to avoid concluding that there was nothing hidden anywhere, no mystery left in the world. Near the airport in Dallas, she followed journalists to where they snapped pictures of debris—a large, mangled engine from the crashed plane. It’s a Rolls-Royce engine, they said. The plane flew through lightning over New Orleans. Then it crashed right here. That’s all we know, they said.
The journalists took so many pictures and circled the Rolls-Royce engine looking for signs of thunderbolts. There were no signs Izzy could see, other than clear and total destruction, which didn’t seem to signal anything other than what it was. Anyway, no angels.
She took the bus back through Fort Worth and stopped in a development south of there where she’d heard from different slurrers at the liquor store that there were whole neighborhoods of mansions unfinished, not abandoned, exactly, but their construction a year into hiatus on account of the bust. There were squatters. Izzy picked one shell of a mansion and lay down in it, spooned bottles of gin until October when the cold finally made her go out to meet the other squatters. They were nice, as far as it went, as far as there were drugs to go around. And, mostly, there were drugs to go around. It was coke, which around here they smoked, and when she could not get that, it was quaaludes. It was gin, always. It was the persistent grind of her thoughts against her feelings. She got hooked briefly on bennies, a habit she kicked by getting hooked on Valium, and when the Valium felt close to making her dissipate completely, she chewed up pills from a housepainter who said they were maybe the chemical she was after—that old-fashioned whetstone. The housepainter didn’t paint houses much anymore. When he did, Izzy went along because he couldn’t lift much. He was sick. These days he mostly sold drugs, just enough to do drugs, and now used Izzy to help him, paid her in what was left. Told her to stay away from needles. She hated needles and never used them. She liked pills best. Uppers and downers, hunting for balance. Izzy was a scale, and her fulcrum was wonky. Everywhere the measurements were off. Corners grew crooked, the ground unlevel, the globe squished so people’s faces bulged like torn by space-time and sometimes, like a popped balloon, they deflated to flat and folded in on themselves and for a long stretch Izzy could not recognize anyone as human.
—
Many of the folks living in the unfinished McMansions had jobs and vehicles. It was like any other neighborhood, though without power or water. Around driveway fires built to keep warm at night, she talked to the housepainter, or mostly sat with him as he drifted in and out on heroin. She kept an eye on him. He was getting thin. Some days the housepainter didn’t wake up. He was going to die, which he said often. I am gonna die in a mansion at least, he said. Izzy did what she could to keep them alive and high, taking small paint jobs, selling drugs in the cul-de-sac.
A new year came. Late January and the moon was a day past full, waning again. Izzy stayed up by the fire in the driveway, studying the light of the flames on one hand, and the light of the moon on the other. The flames sculpted her harshly. The moon sculpted her gently. She talked about a thing she’d read about the moon’s cycles, about how the orbits were such that there were long synchronicities. The housepainter nodded along. Yesterday was a full moon, said Izzy. Yesterday was January 26. The last time there was a full moon on January 26, that was nineteen years ago. Isn’t that something? Every nineteen years, the full moon returns to the same place in the sky. All the phases of the moon fall on almost exactly the same days they fell on nineteen years ago. Wherever the barely waning moon is tonight, in the constellation Leo maybe, then the barely waning moon was in that same spot, or close to it, on this night back in 1967. The Metonic cycle, it’s called. It doesn’t match our normal solar calendar exactly, but it’s pretty close. Just look up and be patient and you’ll see. It changes your whole brain when you start to clock things by the moon, to look at life not day by day but using these long synchronicities. It makes it easier, I think. Take it one Metonic cycle at a time.
The barely waning moon shone big and curious in the same spot it had shone nineteen years ago when the first Apollo burned, the night she’d got her rapture scar. How had it been nineteen years since La Luz? Izzy was maybe thirty. What year would it be when this same moon came around again to this same spot in the sky on this same day? 2005. Would she see it then? And what about the time after that? She did the math on her fingers. She said it aloud—2024—and it sounded like science fiction, sounded like a year when, if it ever really came to pass, everything would be futurized beyond flesh. Maybe there would be bodies but they would have televisions for heads. Everyone would flap rare-earth wings.
When dusk broke, she shook the housepainter for a ride to the store but he only moaned so she took his truck. Over the radio came news of an impending launch. Izzy idled in the parking lot of the liquor store listening about final preparations for the spaceship. She wanted Abel. In the glove box were checkbooks the housepainter had stolen. Izzy took one to Big Al’s Appliances and tried to buy a wall of televisions.
That aint the kind of thing we sell, said Big Al.
He did have a brand-new forty-inch RCA Dimensia. It had a sleek black plastic cabinet with detached stereo speakers that looked like they belonged in a stadium. $2,999. Izzy filled out a stolen check. Big Al examined it closely.
My husband loves to watch his football, said Izzy. This television is for him.
The Super Bowl was two days ago, lady. The Bears whooped the Patriots in New Orleans.
Oh, I know. My husband just loves the Bears.
Big Al shrugged and had his sons load into the pickup a hulking Dimensia.
She drove to a park near Texas Christian University. She hopped a curb onto the grass and went through a garden of dormant rosebushes. She stopped near a playground where mothers rolled stink eyes her way and gathered their kids nearer to them from the swings and slides. But the mothers didn’t wholly retreat. They watched Izzy pull the plastic wrap from the television. She spliced the power cord onto jumper cables from the toolbox and fired the Dimensia up on the truck’s battery. She set the big speakers on the ground beside the truck and ran wires and twisted wire nuts and sat in the cab every few minutes to hunch out of view and snort another bump from the truck’s key.
By late morning a crowd of a hundred kids and their mothers lingered, young kids, all the kids not in school, their mothers explaining to them something of the Apollo missions, something of the moon, how this time was different because this time a regular citizen was going to space, different because this meant that one day they too, as regular citizens, would get to go to space. The whole universe was there for the taking. And now we had this grand gesture to prove it, a schoolteacher astronaut. The mothers had calmed considerably because the big Dimensia and the big speakers gave the sense of some official event, as did Izzy’s coveralls. As she worked, she mumbled things like, This do in remembrance. The mothers figured she must be from the Christian college. Izzy got the Dimensia tuned with a makeshift antenna and then there it was: the spaceship waiting to lift off. Cape Canaveral. T-minus thirty minutes. A whole group of kids walked over from a nearby day care. Izzy mumbled more scripture. Mostly about love. Stuff she’d forgotten she hadn’t forgot. It comes back this way sometimes, the old religion you’ve tried so hard to escape. And it’s not always the worst thing when it does. She hoped Abel would be resurrected someday. The housepainter too. Momma. All of us.
The countdown approached zero and the main engine flamed and everyone in the park cheered. The spaceship rose. The sound from the stereo speakers was greater than Izzy had hoped. The truck shook. The swing sets rattled. The spaceship cleared the tower and the broadcast cut to a long shot. Cheering in the park intensified as the fiery tail of propellant stretched to fill the whole screen. The spaceship rolled and the voices of mission control popped in and out. For a long time, the view was from almost directly below the spaceship and though everyone was watching the Dimensia in front of them, their heads were sort of cocked upward like they were actually seeing the spaceship rocket through the atmosphere above them. The cameras struggled to keep the spaceship in frame. The screen pulsed. In and out of focus. Pulse. Pulse. The burning propellant turned to white exhaust. Pulse. They are away! said the newsman. And then, the spaceship exploded.
The long trail of exhaust spiraled off into multiple trails as wreckage fell over Florida. Smaller zipping trails broke into more, smaller zipping trails so that many of the possible trajectories of the wreckage of the spaceship became visible, like the straight line of fate gnarled suddenly into chaos. All the mothers gasped. The children cheered thinking this was part of the show until their mothers squeezed their arms. Then the children cried.
Obviously, a major malfunction, said mission control.
The families stood until the shock wore off and then the mothers began to shout, first one and soon the whole crowd of them, all these mothers screaming at Izzy for traumatizing their kids. They screamed themselves hoarse and dragged their crying kids off, hurried home to see if any disaster had happened there.
Izzy sat alone on the grass. The explosion replayed. Different voices talked about different ways anyone might or might not escape such a thing. Izzy disconnected the speakers. The explosion of the spaceship replayed on the Dimensia silently. She got into the toolbox and pulled out the paintbrushes. In the back of the cab, she found rusty quarts of paint. She pried open the cans. She sat in the truck’s bed crossed-legged before the Dimensia, staring into it. With the dregs of a can of blue and the dregs of a can of red and the dregs of cans of green she painted over the screen. Izzy brushed on layer after layer after layer of paint until nothing of the broadcast shone through.
STAYING DRY AT SEAWORLD — TRUSS MONKEY — THE SLOW DAYS — GOD’S ANGER LINGERS — THE LONELY DOVE — PASSING PERIHELION — ON A LAPTOP, HEAVEN’S GATE — ABOVE, DOLPHINS MOONWALKING — PSYCHIC FRIEND BETRAYAL — PRISM OF LASERS IN THE WOMB — GRUNION RUN — THEORIES OF FAITH VIRALITY — THE TALENT, AGITATED — SO MUCH, UPON A WHEELBARROW — RIDING THE GREAT WHITE
IN THE CANTINA HUNG a sign fashioned from snorkels: A REAL DIVE! For food they served octopus nachos which were ground beef in taco shells shaped like clams. A radio blared news which was not news because the day was April Fools’. Izzy had struggled ten years to get clean and about that there was little to say except it was hard and Texas was a terrible place to do it. She was mostly sober but not healed. She was maybe forty. The nachos were nasty.
She had this job now, running lights for the dolphin extravaganza at SeaWorld in San Antonio. Trainers in wet suits and Stetsons two-stepped to Garth Brooks while dolphins did acrobatics in a rusty tank. Izzy sat daily above the tank in a control booth pushing buttons to give the show some excitement, floods of PAR cans in all colors and strobes and lately even lasers so the dolphins were like pop stars, their synchronized flying-backward-tailwalks alive with all the pulsing stage lights of an arena rock show. Six performances a day and they were all pretty much a drag, both in monotony (experimenting with lighting cues was frowned upon, as it agitated the talent) and morality (neither dolphins, nor dolphin shows, belonged in Texas). Izzy kept the job anyway because every morning and every night she was tasked with climbing truss—had to click into a threadbare harness and climb forty treacherous feet to focus lights and replace burnt gels and rotate gobos and swap lamps and run wire all while scrambling monkey-like over slick steel high above the aquatic arena—and climbing truss only worked sober.
In between performances, on slow days, Izzy hung around the Crustacean Cantina. Slow days were dangerous days for a former drunk. But the cantina’s vibes were so odd that, while there, Izzy never itched to get sideways on pills or booze—being at the Crustacean was its own hallucination. The little patio bar was just far enough from the water park full of screaming kids pissing in its wading pools, far enough from the constant crowds by the killer whales, a respite with cooling misters amid lesser wildlife exhibits, like the snake farm. Honks and rattles of seals wafted always through the warm Texas air which reeked of artificial ocean. The cantina served airmen from Lackland sucking two deep at fishbowl margaritas, or parents sneaking off from the toil of family outings, or animal trainers half-peeled from their wet suits on smoke breaks, or the occasional sad retiree catching his breath after waddling alone from the Penguin Encounter. Since February there’d also been crowds for the Great White—the first-ever roller coaster at SeaWorld, brand-new and complete with vertical loops and zero-g rolls ragdolling riders over an aquarium of sharks. Some nervous Nellies required a shot of liquid courage before the ride. After chatting with Izzy, they usually took two. The line for the roller coaster is so long, Izzy would say. I wouldn’t ever stand in that line. No thanks, you know? Life already whips you around. And then all the stories you hear about the Rattler over at Fiesta Texas. People’s spines shattering and all that. Sliding from their harnesses like jelly. But nobody’s died on our ride. It’s brand-new.
Over the radio came news of tragedy regarding a strange cult out west. The reporter said somberly several times, Folks, this one’s no April Fools’. This UFO cult, well, it’s the real news of the world. They’re all dead.
A big man sat at the bar a few stools from Izzy. He ordered apple juice. He sipped.
Izzy picked at her octopus nachos, pretended to ignore the radio.
Do you know the origin of April Fools’? said the man.
Don’t care, said Izzy.
He was an old man who used to be large but sat hunched, saggy, a few knots of muscle here and there, bulging. His presence was menacing but only metaphysically, like he was a sack of ghosts trying to punch their way out. Piled there, he sipped loudly.
After forty days the rain stopped, said the man. Out from the window of his ark, Noah sent a dove. This was the first day of April, according to tradition. The dove returned with nothing. A fool’s errand. The dove comes back with no news of rebirth. God’s anger lingers yet. It’s the apocalypse, still. April Fools’!
Sure, said Izzy. But then Noah sent it out again. And the dove came back with an olive leaf.
You know the Good Book!
Some. Once.
But do you remember that Noah sent the dove out from the ark a third time? And the third time, the dove did not come back at all.
Maybe I forgot that part. Again, I don’t care.
Ah, see? This third flight of the dove was the ultimate sign of hope: to disappear completely. There was no need for an ark after the great flood. So why should the dove return? Better to disappear into the resurrected world.
Izzy tried to shrug him off by feigning interest in the nachos but couldn’t bring herself to put any in her mouth. She sat there, stirring them.
The man kept on, What if it was not the olive branch that became our everlasting symbol of peace? What if, to symbolize that we have survived the worst, that we are again on the brink of a beautiful new world, peace at last, there was, instead of the olive branch, nothingness. But how do you show nothing? Nothing cannot be a symbol. So, we get olive branches. We get rainbows. Oh, well. Cheers to the disappearing dove. Cheers to the absence which brings hope.
The man raised his juice. He smiled big and drank.
So after this dove flies off, said Izzy, for the third time, never to return, then there was only one dove left on the ark. And now that lonely dove has got to search all over for the only other dove left in the world? Kinda messed up.
Surely you know the story better than that.
Two by two. That’s the story of Noah’s ark. One minus one. That’s math.
The man downed the last gulp of juice and said, Of fowls also of the heavens by sevens to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. People always get that wrong. Noah had seven each of the winged things. Always good to have more winged things.
