Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

In answer I gave her a little toot. Not Mrs. Fontaine but another supplier, someone who was a sort of girlfriend, though only snortable heroin had brought us together, had a little horn on her keychain she would bring out in the face of any sort of adversity — a flat tire or a broken foot or syphilis, syphilis being a two-toot trouble. “Toot them away!” she’d say, and laugh really quite innocently. She was beaten to death by a boyfriend more passionate but less gentle than me, and died one night at the General Hospital in the ER while I was on duty seeing children. I recognized her worked-over corpse when I went into the trauma room to fetch a warm blanket for a cold baby.

The angel changed with just the smallest hit. She’d barely warned me not to do it before she was stretching and shaking her wings, and there was the awful stench just for a moment, and then there was another odor, fresh grass and cookies and new snow on the sidewalk. And she put off her haggery with a few shakes of her head, her eyes bright now but not icy like my sisters’, and with a few sweeps of her fingers — it’s always as if she is primping for me — she undid all the tangles from her hair. Three times she shook her hips and the housedress became a lovely blue sari, and her pretty feet were naked.

“Take that!” I stuttered at her.

“Better have another,” she said, and I did. Then she stood in front of me with her hands on my shoulders, steadying them while they shook. It wasn’t the first time that I’d felt like I was flying backwards; the toilet was a vessel in the air propelled by weeping, and with her hands laid upon me she was steering me.

“Do I have to go back there?” I asked her, when I was feeling better.

“Not yet, my love,” she said. “Not until you are good and ready.”

When I was a child she was always good, but this is not to say she was never awful. Though many days she was so ordinary a tag-along that I hardly thought of her as an angel, every so often she would put on such majesty it made me cower. One day in fifth grade I was half-listening to Mrs. Khemlani’s talk about cowboys and Indians. “History always moves west,” she said, because that was one of the truisms she announced at the beginning of the semester, and she liked to point out how right she was about things at some point in every lesson. Books will always be burned, she said, and women are always second-class citizens, and history from the dawn of time has always swept in a westward circle around the globe.

I was only half-listening, daydreaming about Chinese ladies and their very small feet, about which we’d just been learning in social studies. I was fascinated by the pictures we’d seen, and had held on to the little cardboard shoe I’d made, though it was supposed to be drying on the windowsill with the others, so I could turn it over and over in my hand. The angel was standing or sitting around the class in her usual positions, done up today in the dress and skin of a Chinese girl — sometimes her form obliged my fancy, though I knew I could not control it, having already tried to make her take on the shape of a dog or an ear of corn by staring and concentrating at her until she said to stop it.

On little crippled feet she hobbled up to the front of the class when she heard Mrs. Khemlani talking about the grand sweep of history, a look on her face that I had learned to associate with anger at something stupid she’d just heard. I was used to getting lectures that no one else could hear, or having her place a hand on a book I was reading to say, “Listen, it was not so.”

“Once the most important city in the world was Nanking,” Mrs. Khemlani was saying. “Then it was Athens, and then it was Rome. Later it was Vienna, and after that it was Paris and then London and then Boston and then New York. But, look here, now it is becoming San Francisco, and where next after that? My husband says outer space because he is an engineer and has a very scientific mind, but I say west, and so back to the East!”

Cindy Hacklight, my neighbor across the aisle, asked what this had to do with cowboys or Indians, but Mrs. Khemlani’s response was drowned out for me by the angel’s voice.

“Not so!” she shouted, stamping her foot at the head of the class, standing behind Mrs. Khemlani and growing out of her child’s form. It was the first time I’d ever seen her in the guise of an adult, and she made herself huge. Her head scraped the ceiling and her wings spread from one end of the class to the other. “Not west!” she said, and pictures started to flash in her wings, men whispering in dark rooms, and soldiers at war, and tanks rolling through villages like they did in old newsreels, and people just sitting quietly together. She had stopped saying words but her wings were certainly speaking to me, images blaring out of the white depths and, more than that, feelings radiating off them so I knew sadness and joy and rage and sourceless love together and in succession, the images and feelings a speech by which she communicated to me the true sweep of history. “It’s toward you!” she said, unnecessarily, because she had given me to understand myself as riding an enormous tide — sitting at my desk, I could feel the relentless pressure of history under my feet, pushing me up through some mysterious medium toward a goal I could not describe except by its brightness, but I could see it in that moment very clearly. I leaped up from my desk, dropping my little torture-shoe, and threw up my hands above my head and gave my best up-with-people “Hooray!” I was eleven years old and thought I understood what she had in store for me, and felt sufficient to it in a way I can’t comprehend now.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Khemlani, who thought I was applauding her theory. “Hooray! Hooray for history !”

Better to be a garbageman than a doctor, when your father gets sick. If I were a tree surgeon or a schoolteacher or a truffle-snuffler, or even a plain old junkie, then sickness would just be sickness, just something to be borne and not something I was supposed to be able to defeat. For months my sisters had wheedled me into meddling consults with my father’s doctors, and I had pretended to understand what they were saying to me, and offered ungrounded opinions to them and to my sisters and my father. Even if I hadn’t cheated my way through medical school, the task of recalling the lost knowledge of pathology from second year would have been beyond me. I make my living praising the beauty of well children. I love babies and I love ketamine, and that’s really why I became a pediatrician, not because I hate illness, or really ever wanted to make anybody better, or ever convinced myself that I could.

But nobody deducts the credit I deserve for being impaired and a fake. The doctors hear you are a doctor and enlist you in their hopeless task, and fork over the greater portion of the guilt packaged up in the hopeless task. The nurses hear you are a doctor and hate you immediately for judging their work and for interfering. And the angel, who has catalogued my every failing and should know better, berated me for failing to save my father’s life as it became more and more obvious day by day that he was going to die. It was the least I could do, she told me, because even this miracle is nothing compared to what I was supposed to grow up to achieve. And if I could do this, then everything else would turn around. It was the first hope, besides death, she’d offered in a long time.

“He is not an enemy you can outwit,” said Mrs. Scott, one of my father’s Tuesday chemotherapy buddies. He got out of the hospital a week after I arrived home, and for another month I took him every week for his infusions. Lately he was too tired to talk, or else just sick of her. He fell asleep during every infusion, and left me alone to talk to her. He confided that he hated the way she whored after hope — every week something else was going to save her life — and I’d think he was faking it just to escape her if I didn’t know firsthand the beautiful thick sleep that IV Benadryl can bring. Every session they began a conversation about whatever late discovery she had made in the pages of Prevention or Ayurdevic Weekly or High Colonic Fancy , and five minutes into it he would tell her he felt oblivion pressing on his face, and five minutes after that his chin was on his chest and he was snoring softer than he does in natural slumber. And because I could not put a shoe heel deep into her mouth to shut her up, I always suggested a game of checkers or cards or backgammon. Dr. Klar’s infusion salon was packed with those sorts of diversions.