Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

“Angels are no different from demons,” Fork-Foot had said.

Did they ever change sides?

As if summoned by the thought, a rush of warm, moist air blew in, Leviathan itself breathing upon the alley, followed by a flutter of wings. The angel landed next to Sesalem in a straight drop eerily reminiscent of Fork-Foot’s most recent appearance.

It was almost seven feet tall, cadaverously thin, with junkie arms—all slack, stringy muscles and blue tendons. It wore leather pants with buckled motorcycle boots. The angel’s bare chest was covered with an ornate tattoo of Michelangelo’s Pietà . Great gray wings swept behind the angel, matching greasy gray dreadlocks and sea-gray eyes. The angel had silver rings on each finger and he smelled like an overheated motorcycle.

“Just because we’re good,” the angel said, as if picking up a prior conversation, “doesn’t mean we’re nice.”

“The good don’t kill the innocent.” Sesalem palmed his .38. Even loaded with silver bullets dipped in holy water and myrrh, the gun wouldn’t do much for him now. It still made him feel better.

“The good do what they can in these late days.” The angel glanced at the sticky paint on the pavement. “She would have met someone. He would have been the wrong person, led her places she shouldn’t go. She had power in her, Detective. Power that could have blossomed into something terrible.”

“People get crucified on traffic lights in this town,” said Sesalem. “I got a new definition of ‘terrible.’ So why not just turn her around and point her home? Or better yet, kill that wrong person. He might have deserved it.”

The angel shook its head. “There were no good exits from this alley for Sheshondra Rouse.”

“You needed him,” breathed Sesalem in a burst of insight, “him but not her. He’s a source or a contact or something. She had some spiritual power, loose in the world. Disposable.”

“My war never ends, Detective. Does yours?”

Was it a man Rouse had come to see? An angel? Or a demon?

There didn’t seem to be a difference.

“One of your people went bad,” Sesalem said. “She died for it.”

“Almost correct,” said the angel. “One of theirs went good. But he needed a soul to carry him upward.”

Then the angel vanished, leaving a swirling gray feather perhaps a yard long. Sesalem holstered the gun, snatched the feather from the air, and trudged back toward his Land Cruiser.

All four tires were flat, slashed by needled claws. Sesalem looked back down the alley in time to catch a beam of light, a young black girl standing in it, talking to a tall, bejeweled demon—Fork-Foot?

Then they were gone.

It was a long walk home. He threw his cell phone in the river to stop it ringing, following it with his badge, but kept the feather. “How good is good?” he asked it.

There was no answer.

People say there are no atheists in the foxholes, but people are idiots. It’s awfully tough to believe in God when you’re knee deep in mud, blood, and other men’s guts. Combat is the Problem of Evil on the hoof.

But if you really want to feel the stress of divine regard, spend time in an oncology unit. The half-hidden whispers and the strained smiles and the whirring click of the infusion pumps form a choir of pain every bit as agonized as the howls of the damned in some imagined hell.

i: I believe in the dark miracle of uncontrolled cell division, creating tiny, undifferentiated embryos of hate who are nonetheless children of my body.

You enter your days like everyone else. There is an alarm clock sometime before dawn, an electronic voice calling to you through the fragmented wilderness of your dreams. There is a moment of blessed relief as you take the day’s first piss. There is that odd echo of flowing warmth in your shower. You shave, perhaps your face, perhaps your legs, depending on your hormonal balances and grooming preferences. You stumble into hopefully clean underwear and minimally food-stained clothes. You microwave yesterday’s coffee and choke down a pair of brown-sugar-and-cinnamon Pop-Tarts.

Ablutions, evacuations, and alimentation taken care of, you move out into the wider world.

Sometimes you wonder why you do it this way. Two hundred and forty work days a year. Fifty years of a working adult life. Twelve thousand days of this routine, more than half of your allotted twenty-two thousand. Ninety-six thousand hours out of your life, a quarter of the waking hours you will ever experience.

For what? A paycheck? Friday nights spent drinking with your college buddies before they drift off earlier every year, consumed with bleary-eyed guilt toward tired spouses and squalling children?

Still, you do what everyone does. Then sometimes you do it differently. You take a weekend to the coast. You fly away at the holidays to visit aging relatives who still think a sweater vest is a good idea for a gift. You go camping up in the hills and throw out your back sleeping on rocks that were pebbles when you lay down but boulders when you woke up.

Because, really, what else is there? Life is years of sheer, endless boredom punctuated by occasional bouts of the mildly interesting. Not much to do, not much to believe in. Just eat, sleep, shit, breathe, breed, grow old and die.

Somewhere along the way, you acquired your own partner. Or two or three or four, usually in a row with minor overlaps. Serial monogamy is the American way. Changing relationships has become like switching from Cheerios to Rice Krispies. One or two of those partners helped you produce sprogs, either by donating a small amount of warm, sticky fluid to your own efforts, or through dint of nine months of vomiting and backaches and blameful mood swings.

There’s not much to believe in except your kids, and in truth, what are they going to grow up to be? Assuming video games don’t corrupt their plastic little souls and global warming doesn’t drown them in their beds with rising sea levels, they’ll just turn out like you.

Then one day you find blood in the toilet while stumbling around amid receding somnolence. Maybe you ignore it for a while, maybe you dart in immediately to see your doctor in a grip of panic. Still it comes back again and again until you do seek medical advice, that little harbinger of terrible things to come which you cannot yet admit to yourself.

Because that day, you have finally found something to believe in. Something real . Something intensely personal. Death doesn’t play chess for souls anymore, or sit down to an unfriendly game of Texas Hold ’Em. Death approaches along a pathway built from silvery needles and grim lab reports and the hum of CT scanners.

It’s a different game now, and some blood in your morning shit has proven to be your table stakes. You’d best believe you’re playing for your life.

ii: I have faith that my body will do its best to marshal my immune system against these invaders from within, but I also surrender myself to the tender ministrations of the scalpel and the loving embrace of oncological poison that the days of my life shall be filled with terror, nausea, and fatigue.

Oncologists must take classes in how to deliver difficult news. Their medical specialty is as devilish and soul-crushing as a loaded pair of casino dice is to a drunk’s last dollar. You can see the distress in the doctor’s eyes as she comes into the room, not quite meeting your pathetic attempt at a frank gaze.