THE HUMAN USE
OF INHUMAN BEINGS

WHAT KAREN MY wife calls my obsession—my angel—first appeared to me when I was eleven, one of three kids, lifelong pals virtually, who were digging a cave in the steep bank of an arroyo about a hundred yards across a cotton field behind my father’s house. It was June, hot as hot gets in southern New Mexico in that month—dry as ashes, the air like brass against your teeth, the light as painful to the eye as a whine is sharp to the ear—and we had been at work since midmorning, shoveling almost nonstop, grunting with our shirts off like convicts in the hokey movies you can hoot over on late-night TV.

“A fort,” Mickey had called it, but mostly our cave was to be a hideout—a refuge, really—where we would smoke the Winston cigarettes Arch Whitfield stole from his old man while we thumbed the almost greasy pages of the Swank and Sister magazines I’d found the week before under my daddy’s living room couch. We were a club, I’ve told Karen, and, according to our plan, we aimed to be blood brothers and camp out there so we could sneak around after dark shooting out streetlights with fence staples or spying on Mickey’s big sister, Ellen (herself something, it still seems to me, out of pages private and shameful enough to hide).

Around twelve-thirty we stopped to eat the baloney sandwiches and warm Coke I’d brought. Mickey would be dead in about fifteen minutes, but, lying on my side at the mouth of the sizable entrance we’d dug, I couldn’t have imagined any event like that. Instead, while Arch and Mickey talked, I was watching the distant cinder block fence that was the back of my parents’ property and thinking about how tired I felt, my scrawny arms loose as noodles and blisters already starting on my fingers.

There isn’t a lot to know about this moment, nor about those, before the cave collapsed, that followed. In those days, Mickey wanted to be an astronaut (this was about the time John Glenn, so I’ve since heard, peed in his pants in space), but this day he was talking about the Communists—Reds from Cuba and China and Russia itself—and how, if they invaded in the bloodthirsty swarms Mrs. Sweem, our batty fifth-grade teacher, raved about, then we’d retreat to our cave, three pint-size Musketeers, and wreak havoc on convoys and troop movements with our BB guns and high IQs.

“We’ll be guerrillas,” he said. “The scourge of the land.”

I tried imagining the desert all the way to the Organ Mountains, thirty miles east, filled with trucks and tanks that three chicken-chested grade-schoolers were going to disable with spit wads and bombs made from baking soda and vinegar.

“What about it, Arch?” Mickey asked. “We’ll steal, pillage, forage. All we need is a uniform.”

Arch said okay—a know-nothing remark from a kid who then only wanted to roam center field for the Dodgers, an ambition that now must seem pretty corny to the alfafa and lettuce farmer he’s grown up to be.

“We’ll be a militia,” Mickey said. “Colonels X, Y, and Z. We’ll have to swear to secrecy.”

For a minute, we were quiet, in the distance a cloud like a cow going left to right in the disk of sky I could see, and I went back to the thoughts I’d carried out here this morning before it seemed likely that I’d be doing battle with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.

My parents wanted to send me to church camp in the mountains up near Santa Fe, which is about six hours by car north from the spot I was then sitting in, and of course I didn’t want to go. They weren’t religious people, not by a long shot—“Catlick,” my daddy always said, “lapsed all the way”; they just wanted me gone for a week, so they could get down to the business (I see now) of cleaning up the disaster of their marriage without having underfoot a nosy student from the honor roll to talk around. So I was thinking about that and about the night before when I’d heard my mother say, “Professor Prescott, you’re a pathetic son of a bitch, you know that?” and about the thick and sour silence that followed her remark to my father. In the darkness, her voice had had an edge raw as a razor and, in my bedroom at the end of the hall opposite theirs, I felt the air around me turn cold as nights in Greenland, the thump of my heart the only noise after that to listen to.

While I didn’t know exactly what was going on, I knew something profound and permanent had happened in my parents’ bedroom. A statement had been made, one ugly sentence after midnight, and thereafter nothing would ever be the same—not in my house, not on the block of houses I could see from my spot on the floor of the cave; not even on the acres and acres of bleached desert I was looking to the very end of when Arch said, “Up and at ’em, you guys, let’s hustle here.”

I didn’t want to move, and I have told Karen that nothing felt so good then as the cool earth against which I lay curled about six feet away from a mouth-like hole of sunshine.

“C’mon,” Arch said. “I got to go to the pool at three. My mom will have a fit if I’m late.”

“What do you say, Mick?” I asked.

His tennies behind his head for a pillow, he was beside me, his hair flopped over his forehead like wet leaves.

“I’ve got to go, too,” I said. “We’re going to the movies.”

He looked peaceful, I remember, as composed and unbothered as maybe a Musketeer is supposed to look, nothing between him and happiness but the shovel Arch was pointing at him, and then he said, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” an expression as full of grin and good cheer then as the night before my mother’s had been poisonous and full of hiss—in any case, not the last words you or I would utter had we only six to say before place and fortune conspired to snatch us off into eternity.

I heard it then, like a bark in my ear: Move. It was an order whose consequence was not less than life or death—much like those I received, seven years later, from the TL I served under in Vietnam—so I scrambled to my hands and knees and stared at the entrance as though I expected my father to be out there, his face white with fear.

“Let’s go, Mickey,” I said, and began to crawl out.

The cave hadn’t started to collapse yet—that was only seconds away—but again the voice came, this time from several directions at once, not loud but urgent, not panicky but fierce, and until I scrabbled out and was picking up my own shovel, I thought I’d only heard Arch Whitfield, Junior Olympic swimmer, being bossy and clowning around and not Abaddon or Barakiel or Inias or Harbonah. Not any voice from those weightless and wanton creatures that visit from the Principalities and the Powers I eventually learned about in church camp.

Arch noticed the trouble first.

“Billy,” he said to me, his voice cracking.

And then I was looking, too.

At the entrance, a ragged archway tall as the big man I now am, a little dirt was falling like rain and inside, just before the ceiling itself let go and crashed down with a hollow and desolate whump, Mickey Alan Crawford was slowly sitting up to face us, his watery blue eyes not yet going from amusement to horror, his freckly arms not yet rising to cover his head.

“Guys?” Mickey said. “Guys?”

Clods came first, then slabs of earth like the concrete squares of a sidewalk, the whole thing sucking back and down on him, and for an instant—time enough anyway to wish you were as muscle-bound and honorable as Hercules—you could see him in there, through a swirling, clotted mist of sand and dirt, not making a word or a squeak, just his face baffled and eyes shiny as new paint as if, the way it must be for many, he’d been asked a question that couldn’t be answered by anything less than death itself.

“Oh, no,” I said, my own voice failing to hold.

But it was already over, this long-ago accident, and Arch, yelling and waving his arms, was running toward his house and I, coming apart my own self, had fallen to my knees to chop at the pile of dirt, crying and sniveling “Shit, shit, shit” until Arch was racing back—his mother, frantic and screechy with grief, trailing behind in her polka-dot swimsuit—and me still clawing and scratching at the dirt, finding nothing and nothing again, my fingers black with dirt, my own chest heaving as if I, too, were underground and fighting upward through the cold and the fear, the whole of the earth having landed hard on my head.

And then, as I’ve told Karen too often, the voice came again, as detached as those you nowadays hear from your car when the door is ajar, telling me to stop, enough had been done, stop, and I could see that it was coming from a man, substantial as a ditch rider, standing on the bank above me, not twinkly as angels are in Hollywood but ho-hum as a common cowboy. He was shaking his head as if, apart from this hour’s mortal business, his was a job as pleasant to undertake as is the eating of cherry pie on Sunday.

“That’s enough, Billy,” he said. “Lie down, son. Help is coming. Rest.”

They sometimes arrive in hosts, these celestials—guardian or not, patron or otherwise. Egyptians had them, as did the Irish. For the Gnostics, they were the Cosmocrators. Small birds have them, as do tame animals. There’s an angel for patience, as there is one for hope and another for, yes, insomnia. Like an army, there is a chain of command, Cherubim atop Thrones, Virtues above Powers. I have no idea how they move, what conveyance they take up and down to arrive here from the gold-paved and food-filled heaven that is their usual home. That’s why they’re angels, I guess, because they inhabit a dimension we only have oooohhhs and aaaahhhs to describe.

Notwithstanding what Karen now says, I am not a nut about this. Honest. I’ve just come to know, as my daddy might have said, a thing or three. Remember, please, that seeing Mickey buried at the cemetery three days later didn’t make me crazy, either. I was calm, is all, even-minded as an umpire. “Shock” is what my daddy said when he took me up to St. Paul’s camp the next week.

“It’s a defense mechanism,” he said, twice patting my knee when it probably seemed to him that I was on the verge of tears or trembling. “Time heals all wounds,” he said, another cliché, and I turned to him then, barely able to hear because the top was down on his Ford Fairlane convertible.

I was thinking that I should tell him—about the voice, about the whiskery gent who had stood over me for a moment and touched my forehead, his fingers icy as well water, before, like a genie, he disappeared.

“You’ll be okay,” my father said, and, easing back from the brink of something terrible and sad, I sat straight ahead in my seat to see the landscape fly by.

“Dad?” I began.

I could feel him glance my way, and I think now that he was looking at me as he very likely had the night after my mother cussed him: He had come to my room and, lit from behind by the bathroom light, he’d stood in my doorway, skinny as a nail, something about his posture suggesting caution and fear and deepest regret.

“There’s swimming,” he was saying. “And horseback riding. Softball. Craft stuff—the works.”

For a mile or so, while he told me how I’d spend my week, I watched the scrub and jagged mountains, all purples and grays and greens that don’t mean anything. And I think that if I am a little like a machine, as Karen sometimes says I am, then it started here when, through one dip then another, around one turn and another, I felt the valves and gates of me close tight.

“What was it you wanted to say?” my father asked.

In those days, he was a chemistry professor at NMSU, with special interest in anisotropic crystals, so I knew—more with my heart than with any other organ that knows things, knew as my grown daughter Dede claims she knows stuff—that, as a practical man, one whose faith lay in the periodic table and what in his lab he could cook up in beakers and dishes, he would only be puzzled, then alarmed, if I, in his new car at sixty-five miles an hour on a road he could probably recite the exact molecular composition of, started talking about visitors and light and sound that came from above.

“It was nothing,” I told him. “Never mind.”

He gulped, as you would were your own unsettled self saved by silence.

“This’ll be a good week,” he said. “I promise.”

You would think, would you not, that I should have seen an angel or two in Vietnam, where much was murdered and maimed, a place with an honest-to-goodness need for the human use of inhuman beings. After all, as Mickey Crawford had predicted, I was fighting Communists, sneaking around with a rifle and a higher cause to serve. But I did not—not once—though it did seem, during basic training at Fort Bliss in El Paso, that one was present if only unrevealed.

This was in my fifth week there, me just one of thousands who were that year turned into men from the boys we’d earlier been, and perhaps fifty of us had been trucked a ways into the badlands east of the Franklin Mountains to learn how to survive a ville some gung-ho full bird had constructed. That morning, we sat in bleachers while below us, bobbing and weaving behind a lectern, a sergeant yelled at us about being watchful and something-something to the nth degree. Behind him stood this odd collection of buildings—mostly sticks and the like, good tinder if you had a Zippo and a punk’s sense of humor—the whole of it fenced (exactly as such turned out to be way across the ocean blue). It was booby-trapped, he said. CS gas and punji stakes, not to mention pits filled with human excrement that you would fall into, sure as sunrise, if you were too damn bumble-minded to pay attention.

For an hour he went on in this manner, alerting us to trip wires and demonstrating how our adversary, the wily Mr. Charlie, could rig up an explosive—from, hell, no more than a seemingly discarded C ration can, ladies!—that would blow your leg into the next rice paddy. Or blind you. Or cause you misery for the rest of your piss-poor life. I was enthralled, I admit, eager to learn what might save my skin; and I was also semi-distracted, wondering about whatever gland or gene it was that had caused me, several days after graduation, to have presented myself at Uncle Sam’s recruiting office, my only credentials a record of A minuses and sufficient leaping ability to be second off the bench for the Las Cruces High School basketball Bulldogs.

As it had been the day Mickey and Arch and I dug our cave, it was hot, the sun blazing down and the sky so blue it looked phony. We had been divided into rifle teams, Able to Foxtrot, and soon enough one team was instructed to go into that mock village to make it safe for me and mine in green. I knew a few of the boys in the first squad, all of them with nicknames having something to do with body parts or point of national origin—kids named Tex or Ears or Fats—and I was real disappointed to see each of them, one after another, not get much beyond the gate before they were “killed” or otherwise made fools of.

A minute later, another team went in, hot to trot but stealthy as cats. Still, there were more surprises—holes out of which rose the outraged enemy, walls that were false and places for cutthroats to hide, grenades that went boom when you flung open a door for a look-see. I was scared, I have to tell you, my heart slamming left and right—more scared, it would turn out, than I was months later when I landed in the place this wasn’t the actual of, and I remember watching Swamp Thing and Doc disappear in a cloud of harmless smoke that meant, except for the months and miles they were lucky not to have lived and traveled yet, they were ruined forever. Truth to tell, I felt as I did that day our fort began to crumble, my lungs filling with air too dense with light and thorns and threads to breathe. Half of me wanted to turn and go running headlong into the desert, me shedding my pants and shirt quick as my muscles would permit. My other half, that percentage that was angry and pent up, wanted to charge up to our red-faced sergeant to tell him to stop and send us home. But I didn’t. I was stuck, is all, rooted to the earth in a line, and then a voice could be heard behind me.

“Jumping Jesus,” it said, amazed.

In the fake village, Tiny and Gator were inspecting a well that, according to our teed-off noncom, led to a tunnel that led to a room that was a hive of make-believe troops, and I remember turning to the voice behind me, expecting the expectable. I wanted to be out of there, and I was hoping it was an angel to make it so.

His name would turn out to be Brownie—a name no more unusual than Red or Bucky or Fender—but when I turned to him, I didn’t see anything ordinary. Instead, I saw a creature aglow with blues and yellows and oranges—the effects, I think now, of too much sweat in the eyes and too much need in the chest.

“Looky there,” he was saying.

Behind me, so I gathered, others of us were learning the lessons you learn when you are smashed to smithereens, but I was concentrating on Brownie, and then he had stopped staring over my shoulder, his weapon at rest in his arms, to take a peek into my eyes (which may have seemed to be spinning as wildly as those that mad scientists have).

“What’s with you?” he said.

I did not know. I had seen an angel years ago, I could have told him. Maybe he was another.

“Wha—?” he said, backing off a step, and I was wondering what had turned his face dark with confusion. Then I saw it: My hand had come up, one finger extended and moving toward him. Behind me, the sergeant was calling for Foxtrot, me and this fellow among them, but neither of us had budged. My hand was still edging forward, my index finger coming ever closer to his midmost button. I intended to see if he was real. I was going to poke him, maybe pat him down head to toe, and you could see him see that in me. You could see him, real name Brownfield Woodward, study me across the inches that separated us, his eyes narrowed and his mouth tight as the hole to paradise. Time was moving very slowly here, as it does when you can’t sleep, and I remember thinking what a sparkle I myself would make when my finger passed through the twinkle he was. I expected I might burn up or be thoroughly electrified, that I might shoot up into the sky or be atomized into the dust pixies are said to sprinkle.

But I had already done it, made contact, and nothing had happened. I was touching his shirt, a patch of sweat below his breastbone, and nothing had come of our connection. Not a buzz, not any flash of fire that I had read about or thought to predict. He was human matter, like me, and I had proved it. And so, once more able to huff and puff like the Big Bad Wolf, I turned away from that trooper, thoughts settling in me like sand.

Our sergeant was beckoning, and I found myself moving, one step and another, time smooth as butter and me still a victim of it. I was sharp enough to see what imperiled me and careful enough to tiptoe around it, and then this, too, was over—as were the next and the next and the next I have lived to brood about.

I chose to tell it, my story about the angel, only once—to Karen the day I asked her to marry me when we were students at the University of Arizona. This was the same year my parents finally divorced and my father sold his house to move into the Town and Country Apartments up behind Apodaca Park, the baseball fields where I had played Little and Pony Leagues, and something—maybe the goo I am, or the goo I will one day be—had moved me to confess to her that the angels that had appeared to Hippolytus in the second century A.D.. were so tall that, well, their feet were fourteen miles long.

“Imagine it,” I was saying. “Over ten thousand came down on Mount Sinai when Moses was given the laws. In Islam, they—“

“Billy Ray Prescott,” she said, “what are you talking about?”

I took a breath, felt the links of me stiffen and clang.

Beside me, Karen was fussing with her purse, and for a moment I yearned to be small enough to fit inside it. Just me and her comb and her makeup—stuff she’d have forever.

There was a time, I told her, when I knew everything that could be known about angels. Their origin and duties. Their relationship in that hierarchy that leads to God. How they got their names. Even their personalities as such were revealed in the books and pictures I had studied in the library or, when I was eleven, in the reading room at St. Paul’s.

“I’m not religious,” I told her that day.

She nodded, not clearly convinced. She knew me as a Mr. Clean type (yup, I was one of those early bald fellows with a neck like a fireplug), older than the frat boys and jocks who’d chased her, plus a guy with thirteen months of in-country slaughter I had put as far behind me as memory and geography would allow.

“I’m a Libra,” I told her.

She knew that, she reminded me, exasperated as she nowadays gets when cause takes a half hour to make effect. Still, I had a speech to make then, and, yes, I was going to speak it.

“I believe in justice and balance,” I told her. “I’m a hard worker, don’t smoke, do my own laundry, like a clean house. Karen, I know how to fix a car. I pick up after myself.”

As if I had said I was related to Little Miss Muffet—or were warning her about, say, the Communists massing to charge over the ridge behind us—she was focusing on me hard, her eyes dark as pea gravel, exactly the look I received last week when I told her about the second visit of my angel.

“Billy,” she said, “are you sick? Here, let me feel your forehead.”

I considered my situation then, the kids in T-shirts and shorts walking past, and for an instant I pictured me as she must’ve: a mostly well-mannered communications major, virtually on bended knee, yakking for all practical purposes about spacemen or plants that had mastered French.

“Mickey Crawford,” I said presently. “1962.”

She was leaning back a little—body language, they say. “What are you talking about?”

Something was ticking in me like a bomb, so I told her: the cave. The angel. The sky gone white as old bone. The sun like ice. The ambulance bumping across the stubbly field. That crowd of neighbors, all struck quiet and hangdog. Arch holding his mother’s hand as if he expected a chasm, maybe stinky with smoke and brimstone itself, to yawn open beneath him. And my father.

“An angel?” she said, her body still doing most of the talking.

“My dad told me I could go home,” I said.

She looked patient—part schoolmarm, part traffic cop.

“He picked me up,” I told her. “Held me in his arms all the way back to the house. Patted me on the back. Smoothed my hair. Whispered to me all the way.”

A kid was going by us now, too close on a bicycle, and until he disappeared around the faraway corner of MLB #67—about as long as it had taken my father to lug me across the field years before—I watched, my blood pumping three ways at once in my brain.

“Billy, you’re scaring me.”

Whatever was ticking in me had stopped, and I had not burst into pieces or toppled over in a heap.

“Miss Needham,” I said at last, “I need you desperately. Let’s be man and wife, okay?”

She smiled then, in a manner that seemed to involve her shoulders and a goodly percentage of her torso, and in that first minute after she said “yes,” I understood I was obliged to put aside, like gewgaws and trivia you’ve outgrown, all I knew about Thrones and Dominations, those swift and heedless beings who get here by magic and stay around to make us mean.

“You wait here, Billy,” she said. “I’ll get you a Coke.”

The fall after we married, Karen and I moved to El Paso, where I’d gotten a job as an associate writer for the Live at 5:30 program at KTSM TV; and then, soon enough and fortunately, I became assistant producer, then day-of-show producer, then assignment editor for news and executive producer, rising through time, one rung then another—first the guy who does the field interview about the new tiger at the zoo, then the guy who oversees the live broadcast of what the zookeeper can say to well-barbered talent named Doreen or Chad, then the guy who orders the guy to do all that; and finally your hero became the guy who’s supervising nearly five dozen other humans whose days are spent thinking up two-minute stories about rock ’n’ roll grannies or talking lawn mowers to share with the half million Americans with color TV in my corner of the desert.

Rising and rising, I say, until William Prescott, Jr., had mostly forgotten all the goofy secrets and peculiar wisdom he’d discovered in the days and years after the stringbean-like corpse of Colonel X, ravaged and limp and blue in the lips, was dragged out of its grave.

The NAB meeting was in Dallas this year, that confab where shows like A Current Affair or reruns of the Mod Squad are bought and sold, and where celebrities like Montel Williams and Regis Philbin show up to shake your hand for having rented them five evenings a week from the KingWorld syndicate.

It was the last day and I had gone up to my room off the hospitality suite the station had booked in the Westin Galleria, which is that next century of hotel from whose westward windows you can see jets climbing and falling like dragonflies from D/FW. I was tired, too full of what was being sold that day—yammer and video about a public that seemed crabbed or confused and bent in the brain, programs about pistol-packing priests or vegetables in the shape of public monuments, the whole of it served up by blabbermouths who seemed to have been concocted out of the fancy fluids and rare gases my father, before his retirement, had fussed over like a wizard. It was late, the only other person in the suite my son-in-law, Mike, who, as my assistant and a Southern Cal MBA, was along to keep track of the dollars and cents we were spending to bring to West Texas information about, oh, a cheese that caused cancer and the Arkansas moonshiner who was a new father at age seventy-six.

“Long day,” Mike said. His tie loosened, collar undone, loafers kicked off, he looked like he’d reached a place in his calculations where numbers had personalities unstable enough to cause fistfights on either side of the decimal point.

“The longest,” I told him.

I wasn’t really paying attention. Dede, my daughter and his wife, was expecting their first child—a boy, it’s turned out to be, named after yours truly—so I was preoccupied with that and with the thought, given the gut I’d seen in the mirror that morning, that I needed to lose about twenty pounds.

“Champagne, boss?” he said, pointing to the table.

The suite looked like the mess a circus leaves behind, but there were still a couple of untouched bottles and, bushwhacked by fatigue, I felt thirsty enough to drink them, plus whatever else bitter and fizzy that room service could send up in a hour.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, realizing—also with a start—that I wanted to be drunk and that, like shows about witches from Wisconsin and dogs that do long division (Corgis, I think, a snappy, prissy breed), this would be yet one more odd development I’d end up telling Karen about when I got home the next afternoon.

For an hour, we shot the breeze, Mike and me, told tales out of school—who was a crabapple, or a lazybones, or a bottom feeder nobody in management would be sad to say so long to. I told a couple of stories about my youth and Vietnam, and Mike, wistful as what the word swain suggests, told a really sweet version of how he’d fallen in love with my baby girl.

Once, moved by the hour and the confidences, I thought to say something about angels—their fine-spun hair, the clatter some are said to make when they land, the ghastly wail others shriek in the ears of those whose hearts tend toward evil—but Mike was telling an SC story about football, a tale that went as much backward as not (like this one you yourself are hearing), so I just treated myself to another swallow of Cold Duck and said “Uh-huh” in agreement until the punch line came to make me chuckle.

By the second bottle, we’d taken up the bigger world—Saddam and the like—all the woe-washed men and women who didn’t seem to have enough virtue or good sense or ordinary compassion. I was feeling fine, clean inside and able to go back and forth in my brain without losing myself between mind and mouth. But a moment later, when Mike said he was going back to his own room, I knew I’d succeeded in getting tipsy, the physical universe a landscape of carpet and armchairs I’d have to crawl through to find my bed.

“You okay, Billy?” Mike said.

I expect I looked bleary, or partially paralyzed.

“You think anything’s out there?” I asked, making a gesture meant to include to all phenomena out-of-doors and wandering unattached overhead.

“You mean like UFOs?” he said.

I meant spirits, ghosts, and whatever. Trolls, maybe. Demons and devils and gnomes. The whole shebang.

“The whole shebang,” he said, clearly choosing his words very carefully and comically glancing left and right to see if we were alone.

“Seems possible to me,” I told him.

He was standing now, his sleeves rolled down, his belt tightened a notch or two—the actions of a normal man at the end of a normal night.

“It does?” he said.

I had eight thoughts, then eighty, several of which had to do with drinking and the truths you find doing it.

“Sure,” I said, and then, helpless to do much else, I stumbled through a spit-filled paragraph that had in it observations about little green men and hobgoblins from the netherworlds, plus wolf men and vampires and whatever else that might explain the miracles of earth and wind and fire.

“What about bleeding statues,” I said, “that kind of thing?”

“I don’t think about it,” he said. “Honest.”

I didn’t think that possible and made the mistake of saying so.

“I’m not a complicated guy, boss,” he said. “I just turn the mind off.”

Mike looked wind-whipped, his face the color of old cardboard—just the way I’d look, I fear, if he admitted that he had a tail or scales instead of skin—so, feeling the winds whistling in me, I just chuckled to say I was kidding. I was being dumb as a doughnut, and it was time to stop.

“Sorry,” I told him. “Too much Geraldo Rivera, I guess.”

His was a smile not less than three-quarters full of relief, broad as a piano keyboard.

“Maybe you ought to take a vacation, boss. You and Karen go somewhere.”

And so, after he’d shut the door behind him, I rolled leftward and found the floor I’d been looking for.

In bed, I didn’t seem myself. The radio was going, an oldies station, and I did my best to keep the melody to “Lonely Teardrops” by Jackie Wilson and that grapevine song by Marvin Gaye, tune after tune that seemed to connect the me’s I was in yesteryears to the middle-aged me I am now. Helpless as a log in a flood, I was being driven back into the past, before long finding myself sitting on my suitcase at the beginning of the bladed road leading out of St. Paul’s church camp, feeling my lungs fill with simple gladness when my daddy rolled up in his Ford Fairlane to take me home.

Next, stranger memories assaulted me: my daddy hunched over the toilet bowl in his bathroom, moaning and clutching his arms—in the midst of a heart attack he would survive—and my mother standing over him, her expression sidelong and smug as a tyrant, saying, “It’s just the Monday morning blues, Billy, you go on to school.” And this: one trooper from Hotel Company, a kid named Heber from the 1/26, licking a photograph at LZ Thelma in MR II. And this, too: my mother marrying a cattle rancher from the Hondo Valley, the pair of them perfect as magazine models selling wine from faraway places. I wasn’t weepy, just beset, a part of me frightened as a kid in a haunted house, another part wrought up enough to have to find a way—boy, is this spooky—to make myself heard in the night.

So I sang. The shoo-bops and the do-wah-diddies that are the nonsense you make when you are, as I was, foggy-minded and utterly innocent of the real words. And then, before my angel again appeared, I was asleep, still fully dressed, in a land, as I’ve heard it described, of dreamy dreams, where time pools and stretches, where events come to you like clips from a thousand crummy movies; a land where you are yourself a floaty thing that can move without benefit of motors or muscle and where, before you have any other way of knowing it, it is revealed to you that in this valley of et ceteras nothing is holding you up but want and ignorance and luck.

He had not changed, my angel. Unremarkable as a shopper at a bus stop, he looked as he had that day Mickey Crawford suffocated, and for a moment, before I went down and around and the night broke into shards around me, I wondered what he’d been doing over the years between then and now.

“It’s not Dede?” I said, hope and fear only two of the motivations for my question.

It was not, he said.

In the quiet, I was watching him as I believe he was watching me, creatures at the opposite ends of time. In that special voice of his, like an echo coming to your ear down a mile-long pipe, he’d arrived to warn—or prepare, or teach, or help; hell, I don’t know—and for an instant, after I’d risen to sit upright and leave my bed, I feared I might still be asleep and thus doomed to turn around and so see myself lying infant-like in the middle of a king-size bed, my wrinkled suit coat up around my shoulders like a shield, but my body so brilliantly lit up that I could count the bones through my skin.

“Don’t be scared, Billy,” he said.

I didn’t think I was, but my hands had flown up, palsied-like and grabbing at air.

“It’s not Karen,” he said.

Then, as if I had been conked about the ear, I knew.

Perhaps I had known the moment he had touched my toe to fetch me back to the conscious world, or maybe he had sprinkled me with dust or whatever awful powder their terrible tribe uses for the spells they cast. In any event, like a TV show—maybe like a TV show I myself was in this place to buy—I was now seeing my father in his apartment, at the stove frying the minute steaks he liked, the instant before his heart seized up and he slumped to the floor. He was smiling, my father was, his grin as fixed a feature of his face as his eye color and unlobed ears—a smile as lopsided as it had been that day, years and years ago, when he’d said goodbye to me at St. Paul’s and arranged himself again behind the wheel of that spiffy Fairlane he loved. He didn’t look old now, I thought. Not wizened or shrunken or ruined. Just frailer, thinner, and less nimble—what I’ll be when the sun goes down in 2025.

It was hitting him now, the shivers of his battered heart, and for a moment, before the floor came up to him hard and fast, he looked befuddled—like Mickey Alan Crawford the instant before the cave slammed down—as if, his eyes going flat and empty like candle wax, he was seeing death bear down on him, its approach sudden, infinite, and wrong.

“It was quick,” my angel said.

They separate the sheep from the goats, I was thinking. The wheat from the tares. Our angels do not age, nor do they fall ill. They may not reproduce, neither may they marry. They become visible, so I’d once read, by choice, and to some—the daft, the hopeful, the condemned—they have appeared with wings and hands, or full of eyes and encompassed by wheels within wheels. As I’ve told Karen, one book claims they are the oil of joy for our mourning. They are not. That book, like so many, is lying.

“Go away,” I told him.

“You’ll be all right?” he asked.

It had returned, that giant’s fist closing around my insides: I had heard other sentences after dark—these, like my mother’s one night long ago, frightful enough to change the way the world is seen—and, air upon air upon air underneath me, I thought I had stepped off the cliff of the planet itself. All I had were the facts of me—my height, the Cadillac I drive, how clumsy I am at tennis, how loudly I can laugh when the joke is harmless and blue—those details that are the sum of you when you have but one last lesson to learn in life.

When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

It was well past midnight, my floor quiet, in the distance the wail of sirens growing fainter. Karen was up now, I knew. She had received a call from the manager of my father’s apartment building—I had seen that, too, one of a thousand images pulsing in my head—and she was searching in her bedstand for the number of the phone I was sitting next to. In twelve hours, I could be home. In another sixty, I could be standing graveside. But now I was here, a lamp on, the room cold as February, waiting for a bell, so that, my ears still thumping with the impossible beating of wings, I could pick up the phone and say, “I know.”