Something More Than Night (11 page)

Ria sat on it. Her toes just touched the floor. Her unlaced work boots lay in a heap beside the desk, stinking. She had her eyes closed and her fingers laced behind her neck. A woman in French braids sat on a lawn chair beside the door. She looked equally tired.

“Ria.” It came out as a cough. Molly cleared her throat and tried again. “Hi, Ria.”

Ria opened her eyes. Molly gasped.

“Ria! You can see me?” she asked.

A frown furrowed Ria’s brow. She stopped kneading her neck. Her expression was cloudy.

“You see me, don’t you?”

The woman on the lawn chair exhaled heavily. Impatiently. Her eyes were closed, too. Rivulets of sweat cleaned paths through the grit on her sunburned neck.

“I know it’s been a really long time, and I know you’re probably not very happy to see me, but things are really fucked up right now, and I just … Just wanted…” Molly took a long slow breath, strangled a sob in its crib. It was okay to turn to Ria for comfort. But damned if she’d let herself fall apart. Her voice quavered. “I really need to talk to somebody who knows me, you know?”

The smile that touched Ria’s lips was slippery and wistful as an ice cream cone dropped on a summer sidewalk. “Jesus,” she said. “You look like shit.”

Molly cried and laughed at the same time. Tears ran into her mouth. They tasted like the primordial sea. (How did she know that?) “I feel even worse.”

Ria hopped to her feet; her soles slapped the bare concrete. Molly’s stomach gave a flutter. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket. Nothing could hold back the tears. Not even an angel’s willpower. Ria came to her.

Molly said, “I’m sorry I just dropped in on you like this. I would have called but—”

Ria went to the lawn chair. She kissed the other woman on the forehead, then sat on her lap.

“Did you hear what I said?” Ria whispered. “I said you look like shit.”

“So do you,” said the other woman. “And you reek to high heaven. Take a shower, you cow.” Ria laughed. They cuddled.

Molly ran her hands through her hair. “Ria! Look at me, goddamn it!”

The couple on the lawn chair started to kiss. Molly loomed over them. She put a hand under Ria’s chin and gave a gentle tug. She’d forgotten how smooth Ria’s skin felt. Even beneath the sweat and dust. Ria jolted upright. They pulled apart.

“What?” said her girlfriend.

Ria shook her head as though clearing it. “Got a little shock.”

“Sparks flying, huh?”

They laughed again.

Molly stepped behind the chair. She leaned over Ria’s girlfriend, laid her hands on Ria’s shoulders, and shook her.
“See me!”

“Ooh, you’re shaking, babe. You okay?” The girlfriend rubbed her hands up and down Ria’s arms.

Ria hugged herself. Shrugged. “I dunno. Just had a chill.” She leaned forward again, laid her head on the other’s shoulder. “I’m tired,” she yawned. It came out a little slurred, like a noncommittal yawn.

Molly knelt and stared at Ria’s eyes, concentrating.
See me. See me. See me. You must sense me. You have to know I’m here. You knew me so well. Can’t you sense me? You have to see me. Don’t you dare ignore me.

Ria shivered again. She closed her eyes, and slumped more heavily against her girlfriend. The other woman flinched slightly, as though startled by an unexpected touch.

“You drooling on me now?” She shifted her weight.

Ria’s head rolled back. Her nose was bleeding. A long crimson streamer trailed down the other woman’s shoulder and the front of her shirt. Molly and the other woman gasped in unison.

“Ria?” said Molly, her voice sounding like somebody else’s, so weak and querulous.

“Babe?” said the other woman. She tried to sit up, but Ria’s slack body toppled backward. They both tried to catch her, but she tumbled to the floor like a rag doll. Her head clunked on the floor. A wet spot stained the crotch of her cargo pants. Strong odor—Ria had eaten asparagus today.

The girlfriend leaped to her feet, then knelt over Ria. “Ria!” she cried.

Molly started dialing for an ambulance, the earbud having popped into her ear without her consciously summoning it. But she stopped when instead of a connection tone she got the roar of a jet engine and the staticky warble of somebody singing “Que Será, Será” in a thick Scottish brogue. She could call Bayliss, but she didn’t know how to make a call into the real world. And Bayliss hadn’t done a damn thing to help her when she called for help. He showed up after the fact. She was on her own.

She was a ghost, a revenant spirit cursed to witness the death of her old love.

No,
something told her. A sickening murmur at the edge of her consciousness said,
Not to witness.
It was Bayliss’s voice, she realized, making a pronouncement final as the dregs of a wine bottle:
Careful, angel. He’ll stroke out if you keep giving him both barrels.

She had
caused
this. She had done this to Ria.

The memory of something else Bayliss had said landed like a punch in the gut:
there ain’t no afterlife.…

Molly grabbed her hair with one fist. She cried. “Oh no, no, no. Oh God no.” She wailed; the Earth shook.

This was her fault. If Molly truly were an angel, she was Ria’s Angel of Death.

The girlfriend checked Ria’s breath and heartbeat. Molly could hear Ria’s heart thumping away beneath the panicked panting of the girlfriend, the whispering of wind through the surrounding oaks, the patter of squirrels on the roof. She could smell mint on Ria’s breath, too. She was still breathing.

The girlfriend pulled an earbud from a pocket and called an ambulance. Though there were tears in her eyes she didn’t cry while explaining the situation and giving directions. “Calhoun lake bed,” she said, “corner of West Lake and the parkway.” She was calm and focused. Molly liked her for that. It was what Ria needed. She needed somebody strong and effective. Somebody who could hold her.

Molly couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t even hold Ria’s hand while the ambulance came. She was powerless—

What else had Bayliss said? Back at the diner?

… an angel all by its lonesome could shape reality to any old whim, anything at all …

“Screw this,” said Molly.
I reject this bullshit reality.

But she had no idea how to fix things here in the real world. She couldn’t even make her phone call out. How could she undo this?

What if it really was a stroke? Had a blood vessel burst in Ria’s brain? How would she fix that? If she knew where it was, maybe she could imagine it whole again. Imagine no surfeit of blood pressing on the surrounding brain tissue. Undo the leak, push the blood back into its container, seal the hole. But what was Ria’s brain supposed to look like? What had it been before Molly hurt her? Where had all the jelly and blood gone? What if she tried to fix it, but changed something without realizing it, and then Ria wasn’t Ria any longer? Like that railroad guy with the iron rod blown through his skull?

That was just as bad as watching her die. Either way she’d be gone forever.

A faint thrum shook the floor. The vibrations, low and slow like the heartbeat of the Earth, felt more like a subtle pressure than a sound. Ria’s girlfriend didn’t react, but Molly could feel it brushing her eyelashes, tickling her skin. It was too subtle for human senses.

It came from Ria’s skull. The sloshing of spilled blood made it ring like a bell with every beat of her fluttering heart. Molly knew she was listening to the soundtrack of a massive hemorrhage: the inaudible scream of a dying mind.

Shit, shit, shitshitshitshitshit.

She had to fix this. But all that blood … it kept coming and coming, a crimson flood squeezing Ria’s head like an overfilled balloon. Trying to push it all back would be as futile as King Canute cursing the tide. And even if she won, the damage to Ria’s brain … She didn’t know where to begin.

She couldn’t mend this. But she could
undo
it. It was much simpler to imagine a reality where none of this had ever happened. Where she hadn’t tried to force Ria to see her. Where she had never come here in the first place. Where the last few minutes had never happened. Where Molly wouldn’t have to shoulder this regret, too. A reality that conformed to Molly’s frantic wish to undo this. Everything had been fine five minutes ago.

Five minutes
, thought Molly.
That’s all she needs.

Molly shut her eyes and concentrated. She needed a rhythm, but Ria’s feathery heartbeat was too irregular, too weak. Instead she attuned herself to the adrenaline-fueled tempo of the girlfriend’s despair. Her heart was a strong and steady metronome. Somewhere, the shriek of an ambulance siren pierced the evening.

Molly imagined time slowing down, each swing of the metronome’s inverted pendulum taking just a tiny bit longer. She imagined sand trickling through an hourglass, each grain falling more slowly than the one before it. She imagined the blood pulsing more and more slowly into Ria’s skull.

The first signs of change came at the edge of perceptibility. Molly couldn’t tell if the slowing of the other woman’s heartbeat happened because she was finding her center and taking the crisis in stride like a zen master, or because the time between beats was stretching out like soft taffy. But then she felt it in the invisible air, sensed the torpid molasses-eddies of each exhalation.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. Pushed.

Sand grains drifting like feathers. A heartbeat ponderous as church bells. Blood flowing slower than syrup. The ambulance wail fell through the octaves until it became a foghorn. The
lub-dub
of a panicked heart stretched and stretched and stretched until it was just a
lub
, just a negative space in the soundscape, nothing but the liminal silence of a single hand clapping.

Molly opened her eyes. She stood at the center of a frozen tableau. Ria’s girlfriend still knelt beside her, frozen like a victim of Medusa’s gaze, caught in the act of stroking Ria’s face. The whispers of encouragement passing her lips were trapped in gelled air like flies in amber. The world had become a sideways hourglass, its sand motionless, flowing to neither bulb.

She had dammed the river of time, but it pushed back. It squeezed her. A relentless pressure, a swell of pain. The weight of the world was heavy indeed. But it wasn’t enough. Molly gritted her teeth against the pain and pushed still harder. She struggled to maintain her concentration.
Backward,
she managed.
Only a hair … just a few minutes …
She rallied her strength for one final shove.

An inhaled prayer swirled into the girlfriend’s mouth.

The un-beat of a feeble heart sucked a teaspoon of blood from Ria’s brain.

A siren’s un-wail receded into a retreating ambulance, leaving a hole in the night where its shriek had been.

It was working. Just a little more—

The world disappeared in a blaze of searing white light. Molly cowered before an anger so vast it shook the pillars of Heaven; a tidal wave of indignation overwhelmed the breakwaters of her mind. The light scorched away everything it touched. Molly’s concentration shriveled like an ant caught in the sunlight through a third-grader’s magnifying glass. Her consciousness followed.

F
ORBIDDEN
,
screamed the universe.

7

DON’T GET UP, I’LL LET MYSELF OUT

Maybe you’ve been in the sneezer. So maybe you know what it’s like when the prowl car boys get bored and decide you’ll make a fine little pigeon, powerless but smart enough not to kick up a fuss. And maybe you know what it’s like when the brass sees your shiner and he knows the score but you feed him a line about taking a tumble on the curb while you were jammed to the gills. And he’s looking you in the eye and he knows you’re not on the level but the buttons are there looking innocent as altar boys and all you can do is smile and nod and thank him for the hospitality. But he doesn’t like the look of your nose so he asks the wrecking crew to unstraighten it for you.

That’s what it’s like when METATRON gets hot under the collar. It’s no picnic.

The difference is that when the buttons call it a night and pack up the rubber hoses they don’t leave your consciousness spread across a thousand little stains on the walls and floor. Your mind doesn’t disperse into a hundred million fireflies, each crumb of your existence reduced to a feeble glow trapped in a barrel of amber. You go back to your cot and sleep it off. You don’t have to reassemble yourself from bits and pieces of carbon and hemoglobin and nucleic acid and vitreous humor. So after the godlight faded it took a while to rebind the more esoteric pages from the book of my long and fascinating life.

I’d tell you I came to, except there was no “to” at which to come. The Pleroma was still without form and void. But so was my Magisterium. Like a snowball in a potter’s kiln, it had melted, sublimated, steamed away until the furnace heat of METATRON’s rage had cracked the component molecules, stripped the atoms, prised the baryons apart, sintered the underlying concepts. The Voice of God had taken a fire hose to the blackboard. Clean slate.

Joes and janes all over the Pleroma were having the same experience. Not a single Magisterium left standing. The Pleroma had become a featureless infinite-dimensional expanse; the homogeneous superposition of uncountable maybes. It’s like that when METATRON goes on a tear. Been a spell since the last time, though. I’d have to check the calendar, but I’d wager the sun hadn’t yet been making helium the last time around.

Sure it hurts when METATRON does its thing, but that’s beside the point. The pain is a side effect. And besides, it’s not pain as the monkeys would understand it. METATRON doesn’t brandish a willow switch when it takes us behind the shed. No. To beings accustomed to shaping reality with the merest thoughts and whims, there is no greater punishment—no greater chastisement—than the revocation of willpower. The erasure of our personal imprints upon the universe. (How would
you
feel if you were billions of years old with nothing to show for it after all that time? People skip school reunions for less.) So that’s what I found after putting myself together. The Choir’s collective Magisteria had been stripped away, leaving nothing but a bare bones Pleroma.