The Angel of History (22 page)

“Father,” Death said, “I am peace incarnate.”

“Do tell,” Satan said.

“Bloviating Virgil wanted souls to be tormented for one thousand years before they suffered enough, were purified enough, to be permitted to drink from Lethe and find peace. Your ancient Roman poet considered a thousand years’ sad exclusion from the doors of bliss quite acceptable, if not outright glorious. Now, he was a reed-and-papyrus kind of guy, grandiloquent and verbose, whereas I am modern, one hundred and forty characters and quadruple microprocessors, that’s me. I offer peace on demand, instant gratification. Step into the future, leave memories behind, welcome to the land of latest. Want a sip? Go ahead, please. Democratic and ecumenical I am. New and improved, I am Lethe brownies. Eat me.”

“If one can’t kill the savage or castrate him,” Barbara said, “what is to be done? How does one convert a Muslim?” While she spoke ambrosial fragrance filled the room, sweetness of the Lebanese mountains, jasmine and lavender, pine and a hint of cedar, scents that belied her irritation. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, Mary, Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow when your chastity belt stops any kind of flow?”

The seat of all saints looked most like a throne with Barbara in it. Her back remained regally straight, her demeanor rigid, a modest crown upon her head. The peerless academic with fishwife tongue held a miniature tower in her lap, no more than a foot in length, yet impeccably detailed, down to the three tiny windows of the top room, the Trinity.

“Those fucking nuns kept trying to shove Mary down those poor boys’ throats,” Barbara said, “and those were the Christian lads. Our Jacob arrived a Muslim, allegedly; he needed a megadosage, a supersized Mary with fries. Why cut off a boy’s balls when you can freeze them right off with an icy virgin?”

The smell of orange blossom and lemon trees wafted from her; one could practically lick the sour sumac in the delicious air. Satan did not need to goad Barbara, who commenced her sumptuous diatribe as soon as she appeared—no tea required, no apple, just venom.

“And it wasn’t Jewish Mary from Bethlehem that these nuns worshipped. Theirs had nothing to do with ours. Once the West appropriated our religion they turned our poor mother into a frigid altarpiece, no trace of humanity
allowed. Their Bethlehem sounded more like Stockholm. Mary became their arctic suppository. They came to our lands with their corrupt religion, the nuns, the missionaries, and the popemobile. Worshipping Catherine or Margaret was uncivilized. The mountain saints? Heretical! You’re no Christians, the nuns told our boys, bend over so we can shove our higher catechism up your ass.”

Perfume of sweet gardenias and tuberoses fanned out from her pure form like gentle breaths. Her halo shone brighter than the brightest star. Her hair was a dark black, her cheeks a sparkling strawberry red.

“Sleep on, blessed brown people,” Satan said. “O, yet happiest if ye seek no happier state, and know to know no more than what we tell ye.”

“Belief should develop organically, and it did in our mountains, but all these new religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, all of them were forced upon us from far away. Generations of boys and girls were raised broken and unwhole.”

“Why do you think the nuns did their worst damage through Mary?” Satan asked. “I’m not sure I follow that.”

“Original sin,” Barbara said. “Ave Maria and all that,
Ave
derived from
Eva,
inverted because Mary restored what Eve lost. To the nuns, to those disciples of a sanctimonious god, Mary was the antithesis of sin, the boys its embodiment. The Mother of God was supposed to wash clean all the brown races. You know, the French mother superior walked around with a rolled-up map of the Levant in her pocket that she continuously stroked while speaking to the boys, it comforted her, provided her with solace, it pleased her to caress the world she was about to release from darkness. I loathed that soulless bitch. On my feast day, Lebanese
children wore masks and went door-to-door in the villages asking for coins or sweets, a ritual that had gone on for hundreds of years. Within one generation, these stupid Europeans erased it. Only the old people remember now—old people and our poet. He remembers now.”

“Barbara is still raging,” Death said. “All her fire has gone into her temper. That indignant virago has been angry since she lost her head.”

“Can you blame her?” Satan said.

“Of course I can.”

“Effulgence in my glory, son beloved. You have always been so unforgiving.”

“I am naught if not forgiving, Father,” Death said. “Barbara is the one who isn’t. Should she have held a grudge when her father decapitated her? Of course. Should she still grasp it tight to her bosom more than a thousand years later? Of course not, but she’s a Semite through and through, Levantine to the core. They lip-synch the same tired songs every day. The same mitered man who removed her from the liturgical calendar had made Mary the mother of the Church. Should she still be hating him some fifty years later? Please.”

“Which one was he?”

“Paul VI, John XXI, Rocky IV, who cares? They’re all the same to me. I forgive them all. Even that French mother superior. She gulped her Lethean cup with the relish of those who desperately cling to their assumed innocence.”

We sat in silence, four in the waiting room, five if you count Iblis but let’s not, but then he said, For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds a work to do, tell a joke or something. Blondie was peeling another orange, the slight shadow of stubble on his jaw reminded me of someone, not Deke, I couldn’t think who at first, but now I realized it was Jim he took after. I missed Jim, I missed you and Jim and Pinto and Chris and Greg and Lou and how I was with you in my life, who I was. My phone buzzed, a text from Odette that said, I’m waiting for you, fucker, accompanied by a picture of all five feet of her smiling, a loud new streak of red in her hair that matched her pants, arms akimbo, looking like a perfervid mini Superman, I couldn’t help myself, I began to laugh.

Many years ago we spent an evening at home trying to decide which superhero we were, she always wanted
to be Superman, and I could never decide between Robin and Wonder Woman, I mean, Robin is ideal because he was always being captured by baddies and then rescued by Holy Rusted Metal Batman, Holy Buttfuck, Don’t untie me yet, we have a few minutes, but then who wouldn’t want the lasso of truth and Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman’s fiancé, who was willing to postpone the wedding ceremony until she made sure evil and injustice vanished from the earth, but how could two mini brown people like Odette and me be Superman and Wonder Woman? We drank, we dressed up, struck poses, drank, took pictures with digital cameras because that was before camera phones, we vogued, drank some more, until the Ecuadoran with arms akimbo and red panties was Superman, and the Arab with the ratty wig and tit-socks stuffed with basmati rice was Wonder Woman, and as soon as we convinced ourselves that we could pass, we passed out. Satan said, You never wanted to be Storm or Static Shock, no, you always wanted to be a white superhero, didn’t you, and moreover, you couldn’t be Robin because he was a pushy bottom and you were more pussy bottom, so no, it wouldn’t have worked, but nice try.

How do you explain Satan in a text? I wanted to, I wanted to tell Odette all that had happened, was happening. Patience, I texted, pressed the send button,

I will tell you all

I always do

You have been with me

Though this long and protean night

Will sing you my song

When I’m able to write a stanza again.

Her response was instantaneous, Which clinic you at, mariposa?

How could you forget the poem you carved into the wall, Satan said, you are the lord of weak remembrance, can I borrow your Sharpie?

No one else in the waiting room saw Satan walk to the distressed sign on the wall promising that the clinic would provide quality psychological services with compassion, dignity, and respect to its clients in a collaborative environment, and begin collaborating by writing Auden’s lines on the sign in smaller lettering,

Remember, Satan said, how I made you memorize my verses, every line, word for word, by the light of the kerosene lamp in the old rectory, do you remember, I made you write down poems in dark ink, Baudelaire, Goethe, Milton, and Auden, I the Prince, I the chief of many throned powers that led the embattled seraphim to war. You’re wrong, I said, I didn’t learn that Auden poem by the light of the kerosene lamp, not that poem.

True, he said, it was not the kerosene lamp, which ran out on us the night we copied
Danse Macabre,
we had to borrow Sœur Marie-Claire’s cobalt blue oil lamp, you had only one matchstick left and if you blew it we would have been blind for the rest of the night, but you didn’t and the room bloomed around us with the shadows of all the books in the
library, you wrote and wrote, and as you did I allowed to be audible in the rectory only the scratches of pen on paper, a sound just like Shemshem used to make while nosing around in the dark interiors of the kitchen wall, making a nest of shreds, first Auden, then Baudelaire’s litanies,
Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges,
me, the fairest of angels, you do remember, Satan said in my head,
de profundis, clamavi ad te, fili mi.

I examined what he’d written, four lines jam-packed within the sign itself, not one word outside, easy for Ferrigno to wipe off, a new kind of poetry: Papa throws psychological services with compassion and the outcast rose in a collaborative environment. Odette sent another text and I replied right away, This mariposa will be all right, I thumb-typed, and I took back the Sharpie and wrote on the wall beneath the sign,

And Satan said, Not one of your best but not completely horrible, let’s work on it.

Misery is what you get for not dying—misery but some good stuff too. If your harpy mother hadn’t cleaned me out, I would have ended up with different beautiful inheritances from all of you, Lou’s prized mahoganettes bookshelf, Greg’s china, the money from selling Pinto’s Honda, not a bad haul, and another good thing about not dying is you get to see everybody go before you and you know what to expect. Greg saw what happened with Chris’s family, how they purloined the body and forbade Jim or any of us to attend his funeral. Because Greg was the oldest of us, thirty-nine when he died, and he was an estate attorney anyway, he was the most prepared, but then was he, can anyone be prepared, I know you were not, Doc, I know, I’m sorry. A man who lives fully is prepared to die anytime, but has anyone ever lived fully?

Greg had a will already drawn up, no detail of his medical or post-death care left to arbitrariness, he was meticulous, and toward the end all he had left to decide was whether he wanted to be viewed before cremation in a suit or in his leathers, not an easy choice because if he went with the suit, he would betray his clan, and if he chose his chaps, he would shock his lawyer friends. You weren’t part of the decision, Greg and I talked about it for hours, even before he was diagnosed, he knew, he knew where the road he had taken was to end. Oh lord, the day he was diagnosed was overwhelming, commotion for me, not so for him, he had a floater in his eye, nothing scary, he told me, just an annoyance, like a hair in a camera lens, the big things were sure to come, he said, but this wasn’t it yet, but of course it was. Cytomegalovirus, his doctor pronounced the verdict, in those days CMV was rarely found without the presence of another opportunistic infection, tests were needed, what cruel and unusual death sentence would it be: lymphoma, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, toxoplasmosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, mycobacterium tuberculosis, cryptosporidiosis, Hodgkin’s disease, multifocal leukoencephalopathy, encephalitis, cryptococcal meningitis, and many many many more, including of course crucifixion by CMV itself, would you like a little dementia with that?

Upon hearing himself declared one of the many walking dead faggots, Greg did not return to work, but went home and began cleaning his glorious home, a spring cleaning to end all spring cleanings, and when I let myself in, he was polishing the brass pinecones at the bottom of the banister, he did not wish to speak, together we waxed wood, relined shelves with contact paper, we took blinds from the windows
and soaked them in the bathtub, we removed every damn book from the bookshelves, wiped the dust off and reshelved alphabetically, sent all the New Age and self-help ones to Goodwill, bleached every corner of all the bathrooms in the house, for five days we worked until the apartment smelled like a hospital corridor. You know, Doc, for years after, every time I smelled powdered cleansers I would get a debilitating migraine, I’d have to hide under the covers in my darkened room avoiding light and Judy Garland, and I couldn’t remember why, I thought I was allergic to heavy antiseptics, I forgot, Doc, I forgot.

Greg wasn’t satisfied with tidying up surfaces, he emptied out closets, threw out clothes he no longer wore, designer shoes meant for galas he would not attend, impulse purchases, T-shirts, T-shirts, and more T-shirts, jockstraps, bikini underwear he should never have bought, floral silk shorts that had never touched his skin. He threw out record albums, who listened to those anymore, tossed his law degree from Hastings, his Leaving Certificate from Ireland, who was going to ask for those, jettisoned school yearbooks, debate ribbons, class papers, notebooks from lectures he couldn’t remember attending, and his porn stash, his dildos, his sex toys, who needed those anymore? He wanted to control the afterimage. Did the scouring and scrubbing help him, getting rid of so much stuff? Yes, I think it did, during the process he was most his body and least his mind.

I don’t have to tell you what that time with him meant to me, I loved him, always had, but he did not want me, well, didn’t want anyone, couldn’t commit, he told us, he was not a we man, he said, but I loved him, and only when he was diagnosed did he let me into his heart, my Irish Greg.
What good is love when all you do together is weep? Weep and make decisions, we did that, in bed atop the cotton sheets among scattered pillows and handcuffs, he told me he wanted his ashes dispersed in his hometown of Limerick, there once was an emerald city in Ireland, I hadn’t known where he hailed from before, we had all assumed Dublin, but no, he wanted to be returned home. Could I possibly separate his ashes, would it be too much trouble to take some to the University Maternity Hospital where he was born, some to St. Mary’s Cathedral where he was baptized, dump some in the dark, mutinous Shannon waves, some in the estuary, and leave some next to his parents’ graves, could I do that? And he decided to be cremated wearing a suit with a black leather vest over a shirt and under a jacket, with a black handkerchief in his breast pocket instead of the pocket next to the left cheek of his ass, when Death came, he would be both Gregs, and it was to be not just any suit but his favorite one, which hadn’t fit him in at least a few months, like Pinto, he had been wasting away, and none of his clothes fit anymore, none, even those we didn’t throw out. Greg did not want to go through what Pinto had undergone.

The first tailor we visited almost had a psychotic meltdown as soon as Greg walked through the door, he refused to have anything to do with us, when I asked him why, he asked if I was crazy, he worked with pins, didn’t I know that, he was visibly trembling as he screamed at us to leave his shop, as if we were going to pinprick his smarmy soul all the way to Hell. We ended up going where we should have gone in the first place, to Benjie, the fairy Filipino tailor, who not only welcomed us but guaranteed his work, he didn’t want us to worry, You lose more weight, he said, I will adjust
again, lose more and I adjust again, and again, and again, no problem. You remember him, Doc, don’t you? He used to tailor his own jeans so tight he could take only small steps, heaven forbid if he ever needed to run, that angel, he died too, about a year after you did. Twice I had to take Greg to Benjie for suit adjustments, Jim drove us the second time because Greg had begun to dance with Saint Vitus, even with a walker he shook so much it was difficult for him to move, and when we helped him out of the car, passersby walked a wide circle around us untouchables as if even the air about us was a vesicant. The more Greg trembled, the steadier Benjie’s hands, the pins penetrating exactly where they were supposed to, on his knees, Benjie would tell Greg, Save me a place when you get up there, tell the angels I’m coming, tell them to be ready for me, I want big big wings, swan feathers, fitted, of course, tight at the waist, don’t you forget now, golden threads for everybody. Greg got his suit, he got what he wanted.

Thank you for helping me with the dishes the day he died, ill as you were, Doc, it was a lovely gift, standing with you, shoulder to shoulder at the sink, weeping together and washing the dishes, there were so many of them.

Do you remember Hibernia Beach, Doc, men parading shirtless in front of the bank on Castro Street under a blanket of flaxen sunlight, promising acts that should be performed only under cover of darkness? It’s gone, disappeared, erased from our collective memory. Feeling benighted one sunny
day when not a single breath of fresh air came through the open windows, I decided it was time to lie under the sun, its light turning me darker. I would seek in one of the parks a patch of grass the length of a coffin to lie in, not read, not think, become part of the landscape, not fauna but sessile flora. Backpacked nothing but towel and sunglasses, descended the stairs only to find Behemoth sprawled along the door’s threshold, which he never did on weekends, never, he did that only early before the sun came out, only at five in the morning when I wanted to leave for work, he would rush down the stairs, I almost stumbled trying to avoid stepping on him or because I’d forget about the slight swell on the fifth step, he would spread himself, weather-stripping the bottom of the door, two black feet pointing toward either side, and pretend to ignore me. I would pet his tummy and scratch it, and he wouldn’t budge, it took me a few tries while he was still a kitten to figure out how to move him back to the stairs, block him from blocking the door again. I found myself talking to him every morning, I must go work, I’d say, I can’t just quit, how am I going to feed you, why can’t you be like those cute cats on the Internet? I must be crazy for talking to a cat, Doc, mustn’t I?

Remember the day we were all together in Dolores Park, I was trying to get Lou to venture out six weeks after the dreaded lesion appeared, but he refused to take his shirt off as we all did, Pinto was down to his bikini swimsuit in less time than you can say Phoebus, Lou remained covered in long pants and long sleeves, dispensing weak smiles. Do you remember Chris’s wild paisley board shorts? I can’t remember whether that was the last time all seven of us were together, do you? Whisper in my heart, tell me you are
there. I lay with my head in your lap, my knees straddling Greg’s thighs. Little did we know that we should have been happy because everything was going to get worse, even worse than we expected. Your thumb caressed my cheek while a long shelf of clouds hung above us, the sun ignited their pipings, pink flame, orange flame, red and vermilion, and I said to all of you that these clouds had so many colors but not silver and I asked where the phrase Every cloud has a silver lining came from. You understood me, your hair transparent before the insistent sun rays, and you said, To see the silver, you must cut a cloud. How the clouds moved on, how they thickened.

I did not go to the park, I allowed Behemoth to remain a doorstop and went back up the stairs. Baudelaire once wrote that the poet was like the monarch of the clouds, familiar of storms and stars, and God said that Iblis wished to place his throne in the clouds above the earth, becoming equal to Him. Cut a cloud open and you find Satan, you find the poet, cut me.