Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

She ordered a Korean drink of cinnamon and honey and sipped it slow; it reminded her of the taste of Candle’s skin. It reminded her of the smell of his bedsheets, which she had not changed since the night they slew the Inquisition, since the night he sauntered out the door of Cafe Mariposa and did not return for his feathers and pearls. She slept in his alcove now, restless with the inadequacy of her own skin. But if she thought of him, sometimes, it was enough.

Book had not seen him. Bell had not seen Book. He never lost a bet, and he had lost one somehow, and would not speak of how or why. All she knew was that the tattered Great Cathedral had burned from the bottom up in the week after midsummer, and pages, thousands of pages swirled in the air like ash and settled upon its gutted corpse.

They were keeping something from her.

But she’d remembered wings.

Book came into the Cafe Mariposa with a new hunch to his walk, his pocket stuffed with pawn tags and a track card in his hatband. The newspaper was folded under his arm with his brown leather notebook, and a hardcover romance peeked out between its pages. He sat at the wrought iron table and dropped his parcel on its glass top.

“Bell,” he said, and ordered a double shot of whiskey. He looked old. But his wrinkles were smiling.

“Is he coming?” she said, with a catch in her voice.

Book shook his head. “It doesn’t say.”

They waited.

At five to midnight Candle swept through the door on the arms of two girl-children barely old enough to drink, their dark eyes shining with his reflected light. His legs were wrapped in knotted silk scarves and his torso bare and muscled, and he wore no hat but a vineyard wreath, which he hung on a hook on the World Tree as he passed its thick trunk by. He stroked their hair and sent them to the counter with a wink and a wave, then perched backwards on his wrought-iron chair, cradled its back between his thighs.

“What’s the word?” he asked, with a saucy wink and a bow to the Count three tables down.

“No word,” Book breathed, and sagged back in his chair.

“No word,” Bell said, and took his hand. “Wick, you’ll—”

He kissed her hand elaborately and something moved in her throat. “I’ll see you next month,” he said, and stood, and lovers took each others’ hands and snuck away to the rooms veiled in silk and gauze in the hotel upstairs.

Bell, Book, and Candle left the Cafe Mariposa just before close.

Bell sung the changes all the way home.

Pedals pumping, her breathing steady, Molly crests the hill, downshifts and coasts across the desert plateau.

Rhythm. Perpetuity. The whirring, watch-like mechanism of a ten-speed bike, kept from obsolescence and the verges of rust by meticulous care. The comforting, controlled bend of a pair of straight braids in hot, dry wind. The necessity of holding her mouth firmly closed to keep out the dust. The intensity of coloration imposed upon bulbous red boulders by prescription sunglasses, and the wash of white that intrudes from beyond the edge of the lens. Molly thinks of the scientist whose job it is to make vibrant and dynamic the bleak images from the surface of Mars, and how she herself, via those tinted lenses, performs the same task.

A highway sign sails past, like a fellow satellite on a different trajectory. A town rises out of the earth’s curvature: heat-shimmers, irrigation, green landscaping made fantastic by contrast with the pale colors of the desert. And on the town’s outskirts, high atop sandstone cliffs like courses of bricks laid by the hand of God, a man-made structure gleams—all stark, straight lines and perpendicularity, concrete and glass. Art in conflict with nature. A church.

Below it, a parking lot full of windblasted cars, sparkling. Tourists—of whom Molly does not count herself one, though she has never been to Sedona before and does not mean to stay. She isn’t here to leave her mark upon the landscape, or to capture part of it to take home. She’s just a traveler.

Molly angles away from the highway, tracing the smooth curve of the white line exactly, the ten-speed’s wheels holding to it like a rail. She squeezes the brakes. Her sneaker scrapes against pavement.

A water fountain. It bubbles up hot and slowly grows colder. Molly reminds herself not to drink too much. She fills her water bottles, though she has to queue up again with the tourists for each one.

She tightens the straps on her saddlebags, walks the bike to the foot of the stairway where tourists wait to ascend the face of the cliff. A small crowd collects there: Germans, Texans, Japanese, children kicking at pebbles, babies sagging in the heat.

And in their midst, an angel. Golden. Rigid. Immobile, strapped by its legs to the bed of a truck. It stands with knees bent and wings half-spread, as though just arriving, or about to depart. In one hand it carries a trumpet, in the other a scroll. A messenger.

Molly cranes her neck, muscles pleasantly sore from the posture of cycling. The steeple, stark white against the cloudless sky, surmounted by nothing. She imagines the angel up there. The end of its journey. Nobody will see it from this close again. From those distant, gilded lips, no one will hear its message.

Another week and Molly’s summer journey will end at the Pacific. A plane ride home, then back to her parents and school. The thought scares her. She has grown too accustomed to motion.

Hydraulic brakes blast. A tractor-trailer pulls in off the highway, carrying a crane. Squat Navajo workmen push the crowd back from the angel, setting up cones.

She feels faint, lightheaded. Too many miles, in too much heat. The angel swims before her eyes. She decides, in the interest of safety, to allow herself a rest.

Molly hitches a ride into town. She sits in the rear of a pickup, the soles of her sneakers pressed together, one hand gripping the crossbar of the bike. She stretches her thighs, the tips of her braids tickling her shins. The broken red cliffs and the church recede. She sips water, already tepid, and thinks about the mindset of the West—of the kind of society that could exist among such spiritual landscape, yet feel the need to interrupt its beauty with a monument to God. The people riding in the cab of the pickup, a couple with a toddler—she wonders what makes their own mindset so different from hers. On the East Coast, churches are small, unassuming. It’s the ideas they enclose that betray them.

In town, she buys lunch: avocado, sprouts and pickles on a crunchy baguette, iced green tea sweetened with agave. She retreats with her meal from the too-cold air conditioning, sits at a table on the sidewalk. Red rock mountains rise in the distance at either end of the long, main street. Rows of Tibetan prayer pennants strung between phone poles. A shop sells turquoise, woven blankets, kachina dolls; another beside it, astrological symbols, crystal pyramids, recordings of waterfalls. She visits these places, touching objects, looking the proprietor in the eye because she feels obliged to, because that’s what her trip across the country is supposed to be about. Truth versus indoctrination. The real versus the preconceived. She left the ten-speed locked outside the bank, but she carries the bike helmet with her, swinging from her wrist. It reminds her of her transience here—that none of what she does or sees need stick, or mean anything at all.