Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

Beatrice hurried after him, catching up as he was walking down the hill toward the river and the bus stop. The hospital grounds were beautifully landscaped, complete with a small wood that extended to the river. Snow was everywhere on the ground and trees, and still falling thinly. It was very cold. Luke had moved from Louisiana. He thought, on his way down the wooded hill, of his parents’ house, and of his old bedroom. An ambulance wailed by him, going to pick someone up. He began to cry, but stopped by the time he reached the bus stop.

There was a girl there, huddled in a big coat, reading by the light of the streetlamps. She gave him a sullen look and turned back to her magazine. Luke sat down as far from her as he could. Beatrice sat next to him and considered trying to hold his hand. Luke closed his eyes and thought, for no reason he could think of, of the hole in his ceiling. He had still not cleaned up the plaster. He heard laughter.

Opening his eyes, he saw a woman coming toward him. She was dressed in a black shirt and white pants, and looked to him as if she had been out dancing. Her makeup was smeared on her face. He noticed, when she came near, that she reeked of booze.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Pardon me.” She was no one he knew.

“Yes,” he said. He looked at her hair. It was all messy, but he could tell that it had at some recent time been elaborately styled.

“Can you help me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. There was little concern in his voice.

“I’m really bleeding,” she said. “I just got my period, and I’m sort of without supplies. You know? Do you have any?”

“I think you should ask her,” he said, indicating the reading girl with his head. The girl raised her head and looked at them briefly, then ignored them.

“I did. No luck. Have you got some tissues? A hankie? Anything?”

“Sorry,” said Luke. He wanted her to go away.

“It’s really bad,” she said.

“I can’t help you.”

“Well,” she said, touching her white pants, “am I spotting? Can you at least tell me that? I can’t bend over enough to see. I think I’d fall. I’m not myself right now.” Luke met her eyes for a moment. They were blue. He looked down at her crotch.

The woman burst out laughing. “Made you look!” she said. Nearby a man was laughing, too. Luke saw him step out of a shadow. The woman went to him, saying, “Told you I could make him look!” She put her arm around him, and they began to stagger off. Luke looked at the girl with the magazine. She was smiling. He stood up and moved his hands from his jacket pockets to his pants pockets, looking away from her. His face was hot. There was something in his pocket. He took it out.

It was the blue-topped tube that Denis had been missing. Luke had sworn he did not know where it was when Denis asked him, but now he remembered picking it up when Olivia forgot it on a counter. The blood in the tube was dark but not clotted. He held it in his bare hand. It was warm, from being next to his leg. With his thumb he worked the stopper free, then began to run after the woman and her friend. When he was close enough, he splattered it liberally over their necks and backs. The woman touched her hand to the back of her neck and brought it forward to look at it. When she saw the blood, she screamed loud enough to startle winter birds away from the telephone wires where they perched and sang.

“There!” Luke shouted. “There!” The man came forward and punched him square in the face. Luke fell down on the snowy sidewalk, where the man kicked him once in the head, then walked away with his friend, trying to console her. The magazine girl got up to wait for her bus at the next stop.

Beatrice sat down next to Luke. He was staring, unblinking, up into the dawning sky. He felt strangely content lying there, and she was worried for him. She felt overcome by something. When she saw him falling back with blood spraying from his nose, love swelled in her like a sponge so she felt heavy for the first time since she’d awoken in the hospital. She reached out to him.

Though he could feel it when she stroked his forehead, he thought it was just a breeze. When she bent down and kissed him, he thought it was a twitch in his lip, possibly the result of brain damage from the kick to his head.

As she kissed him she had a vision of becoming his spirit wife. In time, she knew now, he would come to feel her and see her and know her. It would be as if she weren’t even dead. The kiss itself, the contact, was thrilling. How could I have left this? she wondered, and she bent down to do it again.

But even as she kissed him, a sharp, clear note sounded in her head, and she knew with exquisite certainty that they had at last harvested her heart from her chest. It was on its way now to someone who needed it and wanted it. As her heart was taken, the veil obscuring her memory was lifted and she recalled with perfect clarity the motivation for her leap. As the last quantities of blood drained from her heart, she stood up and threw out her arms, as if in benediction to the whole winter landscape.

Finished! she cried, and ran off across the street and over the bridge. Halfway across she took off, went up and away, in search of a place without loneliness and desire; without misery and rage, without disappointment; without crushing, impenetrable sadness.

Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime, and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.

Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By then I had known for a long time who was doing all the stabbing. I discovered the identity of the murderer on the first day of June, in the summer of 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I got up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.

“Isn’t that amazing?” my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. “See that? They’re just six months old!” Colm and I were separated at one and a half years. I had no clear memories of either the operation or the attachment, though Colm always claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side, but my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other — that was something I did remember: looking in my mother’s silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.