Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

But it is in her eyes, the gaze of Desire, where this angel’s true power lies. They are rimmed with kohl, draped with lashes like a dark spray of rust. Their brown depths are drowning pools of lust. To catch her glance is to feel your heart stop, to feel blood cold in your arms and hot in your groin. No one, no age or gender, is safe from her eyes, so Desire wears a mask of silk and leather with a coiled snake worked upon it in tiny rubies formed from the blood of those she has loved.

In her hooded beauty she reminds us that Love is the greatest and most terrible of God’s gifts.

Desire’s fraternal twin, Despair, is a young man with hollow eyes and a sunken chest. His hair is the eerie pallor of the starving, the icy white frizz grown by a corpse in its coffin. His skin is so pale as to be almost blue. Despair looks like every student pulled from a morgue freezer, caught on the wrong side of that balancing point between potential and disaster.

His wings are different from his sister’s, composed of what might be called the ghosts of feathers, only brittle shafts and lacy ribs, without soft plumage to fill them out. Despair wears them wound close and tight to his body, just over the leather greatcoat that flaps around his calves. He dresses in torn black denim and an array of ropy scars. Everyone who ever cut themself in his name has inflicted their own wound upon him.

Despair’s power is in his body. Even in shadow, the angle of his repose can cause a man to slump, a woman to turn away with tear-burned eyes. To meet Despair full on, his every muscle broadcasting the hopeless music of the world, is to lay down meek in the street and end your struggle.

He is both God’s invitation and warning to stray from faith.

There is another angel, distant cousin to those already named, the angel of Chance. Chance is an elegant young man. His blond hair flips back in a wave. He favors pastel polo shirts and stylish white slacks. His wings are discreet, a clever accessory to be admired by the matrons of River Oaks or Telegraph Hill, while granddaughters at the country club blush behind their Shirley Temples and whisper youthful scandal of Chance’s single silver earring.

Chance is not concerned with wagering, or the lottery, but rather the common happenstances of life. A missed flight, that relieves the annoyed traveler of death by burning jet fuel hours later in an Iowa cornfield. The flat tire that keeps the family Camry from a patch of black ice, leaving slick, spinning death for someone less favored. Hands bumping together over a book on sale at Powell’s, leading to coffee, then pizza, then a wild night of passion followed by a lifetime of contentment.

You could pass Chance on the street and never really know him except by the twenty-dollar bill you later find stuck to your shoe. Chance is God’s reminder to us that order is not one of the forces of the world.

Flora is the angel of plants and flowers. Her work is found among the world’s oldest and quietest citizens. She wears flowing silks borrowed from her friends among the mulberry leaves, and crowns of whatever blooms that hour and season, be it the moss rose or the orchid. Her wings are spiders’ webs, pale traceries glimmering by moonlight. It is the sight of Flora moving through the gardens of night that gave rise to legends of fairies.

Flora’s hair is all the colors of the natural world, a rainbow turned to river. Her eyes are the brown of soil one moment, the blue of water the next. Her smile is tiny, pursed, a soon-to-open rose. Her heart is just as thorny.

Do not mistake Flora for a benign power. Trees with their roots rend the mightiest works of man. The least lichen is the death of rocks. Your bones will someday be her province, once the worms have cast you out. More patient than Time, she carries worlds in her hands and love of all that grows in her heart.

No one knows what God thought when He set her into the world, but remember that it was sweet Flora who set the order of the plantings in the Garden. It was she that tended the orchards. It was she that placed the fig leaves where a shamed man might find them, and it was she that grew the apple tree where a woman of intellect might climb on advice of a snake.

Word is the oldest angel of all. He is sometimes called “God’s grandfather.” He carries his age well. It shows only in the webbing of lines around his pale, blind eyes, and the stiffness in his step. He has a shock of red hair that lifts in a mutable fire from his head, so that Word is always as tall as he needs to be. His skin is dark as well-baked bread. His face is the face of Everyman.

Blind as he is, Word needs no cane, for his wings serve him well. They arch high as a house, more like the wings of a moth than a bird. Their sensitive fibers build for him a picture of the world. He wears no clothes for textiles would block his wings and pain his senses. Even in his nakedness Word is wrapped in glory.

For you see, in the beginning Word made the world upon the waters when God spat Word from His mouth. Later, Word made flesh. Without their tongues, men would be no more than animals. Without Word, men’s tongues would be no more than meat.

Word is the beacon of our minds and the light of our days, withered proxy for an absent God.

The first note was scribbled on a piece of old cardstock, fountain-pen ink splattered carelessly across the fuzzed textures as if it had been written in haste by someone’s elegant grandmother. The handwriting itself was hardly Palmer Method, instead being as sloppy as the inkwork. Again, signaling haste.

I turned the slightly irregular missive in my well-protected hands, looking at the back where a scrap of printing could just be made out to read “EALOU” in faded vermilion ink that reminded me of old blood. Jealous? I wondered. Or some portmanteau product name such as Sealout. The faint smell of roses emitted from the cardboard, though I was put more in mind of a funeral home than a florist.

Significantly, neither my name nor my address was on the reverse. Only the faded printing and some wear scars. The note itself simply read, “TUESDAY 7:13 P.M.”

Unsigned, undated, unadorned. Stuck into my door, just above the latch where I’d be sure to find the note immediately upon my return from my errands about the city.

Note to gentle readers: I should not like to reveal more about my erstwhile whereabouts for fear of endangering you. Please forgive my lack of specificity concerning such an otherwise elementary matter.

Later on, the rain descended. The matter of climate had much been bruited in the newspapers of late, for so far in the course of this year barely halfway past we had challenged most prior records for annual precipitation. The weather-wise were declaiming that by the end of August this year of rain in the city should be one for the record books. The weather-foolish were proclaiming a need for honest citizens to provision themselves with boats for their porches, and flotation devices that the children might yet swim to school when the curriculum resumed in September.

This year’s rain had been in general possessed of a distinctly unaqueous elasticity. Instead of washing the streets and clearing the air, the water clung with a nigh gelid tenacity to buildings, gutters, trees, and even the unfortunate birds. I was put much in mind of studies recently published in several lower-tier journals of academics and science regarding the polymerization of water. Ordinarily such drastic pronunciations about novel states of matter are thinly disguised pleas for funding or continued sponsorship, and as such I pay them little mind.