Praise for A Flight of Storks and Angels

"A Flight of Storks and Angels by Robert Devereaux [was] one of the first fantasy novels I acquired during my time overseeing the Five Star SF/Fantasy line, and the one acquisition I am the most proud of in that line. Devereaux writes rural fantasy unlike anyone else, with incisive character portraits of both adults and children, keen insight into human nature, and a plot that gradually unfolds until the reader is swept away by it. A work worthy of being reprinted by a major publisher."

—John Helfers

"Robert Devereaux is not a writer of cookie-cutter formula novels. This man has real vision and boldness and originality. Here he takes the premise of guardian angels, which could have been cheesy and very Touched by an Angel, and creates something incredibly moving and beautiful. His use of language in this novel is masterful, his prose style being slightly offbeat . . . , and it hooks you right in. In fact, reading Devereaux's prose was like falling under a spell and falling through a hole into the story. It was magical, like the best of Bradbury . . . . The last third of the book is some of the most riveting stuff I've read in years, and I was so invested in the characters I felt genuine concern for their fates. I like how the ending shows you a promise of what is to come without actually spelling everything out for the reader. Devereaux is a writer that definitely trusts his audience's intelligence and imagination. This is a hell of a book, and one I had never even heard of until recently . . . a real gem!"

—Mark A. Gunnells

Also by Robert Devereaux

Deadweight

Walking Wounded

Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups

Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes

Caliban and Other Tales

Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice

A Flight of Storks and Angels

by

Robert Devereaux

A Flight of Storks and Angels

Copyright © 2003, 2010 by Robert Devereaux. All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

To our better angels.

May Fred Rogers, Miss Frances, and Captain Kangaroo

forever prevail over

the Hoovers, McCarthys, and Cheneys

that lurk within us.

Table of Contents

Part I. A Confluence of Faith

Chapter 1. Love Is a Rose of Snow

Chapter 2. Flesh, Faith, and Fame

Chapter 3. Easy Love, Tough Love

Chapter 4. How Three Turned Into Six and One

Part II. The Blooming of a Community

Chapter 5. Monday Afternoon in Downtown Auroville

Chapter 6. Town Meeting

Chapter 7. Auroville Finds Its Center

Chapter 8. Awakenings and Losses

Part III. Imperfections in a Glass Eye

Chapter 9. The Rest of the World Takes a Peek

Chapter 10. Bubbleburst

Chapter 11. Auroville Fallen

Chapter 12. Goatscape

Epilogue

Saturday Morning and Beyond

About the Author

The photograph shows only the reality; the painting shows not only the reality, but the dream behind it. It’s our dreams, doctor, that carry us on. They separate us from the beasts. I wouldn’t want to go on living if I thought it was all just eating and sleeping and taking my clothes off—I mean, putting them on.

—Mary Chase, Harvey

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

I. A Confluence of Faith

1. Love Is a Rose of Snow

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said Ward to his invisible companion over chess.

Timothy seemed perplexed, so Ward continued: “For all the years Grampa’s been arguing with his muse, you’d’ve thought his bickering would have become just one more background noise.”

Seed-words sounded in his ear: Wise old fellow, an agile mind, a fascinating eavesdrop, a born storyteller. As usual, complete thoughts bloomed out of them. Timothy needed the slightest brush of a thought to set the harp of Ward’s mind shimmering with chords.

“I suppose he is.”

As dearly as he loved his grandfather, Ward saw him rarely. There was the traditional night-time celebration twice yearly at Gregerson’s Ice Cream Parlor, him and his mom and Grampa and Joydrop (Gramma’s nurse), when Grampa shipped his latest manuscript to New York.

And, yes, Grampa sat across from him each evening at dinner, so near that his kind, wrinkled, evenly tanned face filled Ward’s vision like a brooding moon. Even Timothy, usually tuckered out by mealtime, glowed with reflected energy.

But with Gramma tucked cataleptic beneath the covers and Mom off delivering babies at Marshall Hospital much of the time, Grampa mostly kept to himself, letting Joydrop report the highlights of the day’s mail: the flakes, the fans, the pitches for this or that worthy cause for T. E. Jameson to lend his name to.

Move? The black king’s crown gleamed.

“Right. Sorry.”

Out the window through Timothy’s head, Ward saw not fifty yards distant the taut rope ladder, spiked to the ground near a massive oak. The oak tree lofted skyward, splitting into five stocky limbs that supported Grampa’s treehouse.

It was a beautiful day. Ward wished June were here to share it. Though it had only been six weeks, it seemed like forever since she had sat across the chessboard from him. Her parents didn’t much care for him. He was weird, they thought, afraid it would rub off on June. But June liked him. That was what counted. And he liked her too, a whole bunch.

Yesterday she had come home from summer camp. He had the date marked on his calendar. But it felt right to wait a day, and a bright cheery Sunday seemed best for what he had planned.

Postpone our game?

“Hm? Nah, let’s wrap it up. Put the board away, okay?”

Hardy har har! Timothy flitted after him as Ward went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and brought out a tiny white box. Beneath the thin rubber band was the phrase Perrini’s Fine Jewelry embossed in gold. Off with the band, up with the lid.

The sight of the ivory rose on its V of gold chain made him feel funny as he and Timothy hunched over it. Ward licked an index finger, wiped it on his shirt, and touched the rose: hard as stone, as ridged as the ragged underside of a baby tooth, but prettier, rounder, smaller.

Ward had gotten the idea from seeing Patti Singer at the movies the week before. Big Mike DeSario had steered her down the dark aisle like some cow. Patti was kind to Ward, a gum-snapping girl who had sat in front of him in seventh grade homeroom. She liked to shift about in her seat and ask to borrow stuff, pretty much facing forward with her crossed legs and her clingy leather skirts, but twisting around as if to persuade him to say yes, which he always did.

Patti wore front-buttoning sweaters and a tiny heart on a gold chain, a heart that fell into the valley where her sweater strained outward left and right. Glancing at it, Ward sometimes forgot to breathe. The fine hair lay light and downy on Patti’s neck. The clasp and the two thin chain-strands, curving around and down out of sight, made him think where they were going and how exciting it would be to touch the skin her gold heart rested on.

It’s okay, Ward, said Timothy in that concerned tone he had recently adopted.

Ward was stiff again. Alien flesh.

It’s natural.

“Don’t start on that.”

It is!

He glared at Timothy, who was giving him that patronizing look again. His skin tone, his voice, showed an alarming tendency to fade. They both understood that once Ward gave in to his animal urges, no more grains of sand would slide down Timothy’s sand-castle face into Ward’s eyes at bedtime. There would be no more fairy godmother sweeps of the wand. No Timothy at all.

False split.

“Don’t give me that. I feel it.”

Things had been great through fourth grade. But when you turned ten or eleven, grown-ups started acting as if you were out to steal the world and it was only a matter of time before you wised up and began grabbing things.

Junior high, gym class, he’d had to share his locker with a hood who hogged the hooks, one of Big Mike’s gang, Joey Russo, whose wincing eyes made him look as if he’d just been whipped. They made you shower with kids a year older than you, freakish eighth graders with long bodies and hair below their belly buttons. And you too started to sprout there, veering toward beast.

When you saw the Patti Singers of the world, how they gazed at their boyfriends, and what they let them do with their hands when they thought no one was looking, you lusted for their warm curvy bodies, even if you couldn’t imagine talking with them about anything for more than ten seconds at a stretch.

June was different.

Ward had known her since they were five. In fact he had first met her on his fifth birthday, eight years ago tomorrow. That day, Grampa had unveiled the clubhouse as it came to be called, a clone of Ward’s bedroom inside his mom’s house. Bed and dresser, bookshelves, closet space, wallpaper, and one window were identical anyway. On one facade, slate-gray siding faced into the forest, looking as if a chunk of the house had broken off and slid down the sloping lawn to settle near Grampa’s oak. But its three other facades were as fantastical as Wizard Wyann’s cottage in A Sunlit Wood, the book that had launched Grampa’s career in the early seventies.

Art Lockridge, June’s departed uncle, had built both treehouse and clubhouse. Early that morning, he brought June and her parents over for the unveiling. Ward begged his mom to let June stay for the party and they’d been the best of friends ever since. His love for her was perfect spirit, deep as the ocean, no lust at all. Ward gazed at the white rose. It would look great on her, a reflection of the white rose of her soul.

“Come on,” said Ward, wrapping the rubber band around the box. Out the ornate door with its elfin carvings they went.

High above the roof of the treehouse, where solid limbs supported a snug high perch, the plaid of Grampa’s workshirt splashed through an overweave of leaves. His gruff voice continued to pepper the air with indignation over his muse’s errors in judgment.

Straddling a limb beside him?

“Yeah. You can almost see her there, laughing and scrapping back at him.”

Timothy did a Tinkerbelle: sparkles in the air, fairy wings, the whole bit, except that boxing gloves covered his fists like cherries and his face mimicked Grampa’s.

Ward turned away and headed for the house. There sat Gramma at her bedroom window, where she’d sat for as long as Ward could remember.

As he stepped through the sliding glass door, Joydrop looked up from the breakfast table. A hayfall of hair fanned out, ends frayed, upon the shoulders of her baby-blue nightgown. She babooned her lips at the brim of a steaming mug and sipped tea that smelled of matted straw. Comfrey. Her favorite. “G’morning, Ward,” she said, setting the mug down with both hands.

“Morning. How’s Gramma?”

“Fine as ever. Your mom’s at Marshall again.”

“Another baby?” He opened the fridge and poured a glass of orange juice.

“I think so.”

The juice was little more than stale dregs, bitter, not rich and frothy. He poured the last swish of it into the sink, set his glass on the sideboard, and headed for the hall. “I’m going out.”

“Anywhere special?” she asked, a hint of concern in her voice, but mostly nosy. Grampa liked her work and she took good care of Gramma. But Ward had always thought of Joydrop Heartline, born Glenda Hertlein, more like an eccentric aunt who comes to visit and never quite leaves. She was an outsider by choice and destiny, and content to remain so.

“Nope, no place special,” Ward shouted back, turning on the tap in the hall bathroom. He wet his toothbrush and whiffled a blue-mint cleansing throughout his mouth, spat, rinsed, swirled water past gums and teeth.

Behind him in the mirror, Timothy hovered over his shoulders like an excited friend, jazzed about dropping in on June.

*****

Auroville, the seat of El Dorado County, was nestled snug in the heart of California gold country, eight miles south of Sutter’s Mill, where James Marshall panned his way into history. It boasted only a few thousand souls, but to Harold Porter’s way of thinking, Auroville was the perfect town for his wife to be mayor of.

Neither of them had much sympathy for the high-tech bloat so often touted as “growth,” the short-sighted grab at wealth that had squeezed the prunes and apricots out of the Bay Area before it spilled east along I-80. A defiant Davis had been the sole holdout. Sister cities close to Sacramento were malled, siliconized, and overpopulated beyond recognition.

“But Auroville?” said Thea, taking her zigzag route to church, up one street and down another, her way of keeping her finger on the town’s pulse. “It’s pure gold. You know me, Harold. That’s not politician talk. This place is precious. If we were the sort to be tempted, we could get all kinds of rich and powerful here. Let the place go to hell, let the riff-raff in, those heartless developers. Auroville would plump out like a bimbo on chocolates, if you and I didn’t give a damn.”

“That’s true, honey,” said Harold.

His wife drove down Sheridan and swung left onto Main. Nicely preserved for . . . what was she? Fifty-four?

Wrong word. “Preserved” fit the ones whose wigs and thick cosmetics denied old age. But Thea had lucked out. There was a vigor about her despite her years, despite a quiet surrender to fat, the gradual loss of that slimness he’d first been attracted to in the Berkeley coffee houses back in the fifties when she’d read Ferlinghetti-inspired verse while her bored-beyond-words look fended off men.

She had given Harold, square but front-and-center for three nights’ readings, another sort of look, hungry and intrigued. Plenty of years had passed under the bridge. Plenty of changes in both of them.

“This place has a point,” she went on. “People with pointless lives would stream in. They’d shop and watch TV, drink beer and do drugs, drive around aimlessly in Trans-Ams, rob this place of goods and character, and put your brother and his officers in harm’s way. Not as long as I’m mayor they won’t! We’ve got a lovely old town. It has historic interest, that rooted feel, fourteen hundred fine folks keeping things on an even keel, just the right balance of retail trade with agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and the everyday services people deserve. I’d call that perfection!”

“We lucked out,” said Harold.

City Hall came up on the right. Beside it stood the County Courthouse, built eighty years back and recently restored to its original marble. Across the street was the town square, a pride of flowers and greenery, walkways and benches, and a spanking new gazebo that had hosted Tuesday night musical groups in the summer just past. Citizens brought picnic baskets and blankets and shared an easy camaraderie. Thea had looked positively radiant as she welcomed each set of performers and joined Harold on the grass to relax in lawn chairs and drink mint tea while the music delighted them.

“Luckiest turn our lives ever took,” she said. Then she stiffened. “There he is again. Wasn’t he here last week? ‘Course he was. Stupid question.”

“Damned shame.”

“Worse than that, Harold. It’s a disgrace. What’s it been? Three months?”

“More like four.”

“Three months! Carver Haskell used to be a pillar, a young turk. It was fun watching him and Buddy Mendoza try to outsell one another in the eighties. Thank God we went with Buddy. Look at him. He has the nerve to wave at us. Harold, don’t you dare wave back. Pretend you don’t see him.”

“The man lost his wife.” Sometimes Thea could be so hard-hearted. She had blossomed in this job these last twenty years. But she had also gone rock-ribbed and pointed.

She clucked her tongue. “Wife runs off with another man. It happens every day. What does your normal sort do? He goes off in private for a few days, licks his wounds, then climbs back in the saddle and gets on with life. Not Carver Haskell. No, he sits out on the town square in full view of everyone, sells his policies to his nearest competitor—and he would have given those away if Peg Wilkins hadn’t stepped in when the papers came across her desk. Then he drinks himself into first a caricature of the town drunk and then the real thing. He’s a disgrace to Auroville and a disgrace to Tom Haskell and his wife at a time when they ought to be celebrating the new baby to come. The man’s become a blot, a stain on this community.”

“Now Thea, it’s Sunday. No need working yourself—”

“I’m calm. Don’t start on me.”

Harold let it lie. They turned left onto Benham and headed toward City Park. “Isn’t that Laura Keeshan’s son, ambling along like a lost puppy?”

“Where? Oh yes.” The boy lived on the other side of I-50, off Bedford Avenue a mile short of Gold Bug Park. “Probably visiting friends.”

“I doubt it. The poor kid grows up without a daddy, a grampa who’s off his nut, a granny who should have been institutionalized long ago, some rock-worshiping pagan gal who calls herself Joyful Oceanspray or somesuch nonsense—did Joe ever do a background check on her—”

“—many times—”

“—a mother who’s always off delivering babies to make other people’s family lives more complete. Poor kid ought to be on his way to church. That’d put some stability in his life.”

“There’s room in our car. Let’s invite him.”

She gave him a look.

“I wouldn’t mind having his grampa’s income,” said Harold.

“Honestly, now. Any fool can write a book.”

“He gets eight or nine million apiece.”

“Disgraceful. People fill their minds with trash and he gets paid to produce it, empty-headed boobs escaping real problems by imagining they’re elves or knights or some similar idiocy. Drones. You should see the human garbage that wanders into City Hall asking if this is where T. E. Jameson lives. The man brings nothing but notoriety to this town. The day he packs up and leaves will be the day an albatross drops off our necks.”

“I don’t know.” Harold paused. “I picked up one of his books in the library once. It drew me right in.”

Another look. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response. Except to say that you’d better keep that tripe out of our home if you want to maintain harmony between us.”

There’s nothing I want more, thought Harold. Not a thing. A far cry from the days when mutual happiness, a tender give and take, had been their bywords.

“Look,” said Harold, “there’s Reverend Fleischer.”

He had seen the steeple rising, sunlit and tall, before they turned onto Spring Street. Now the sparkling facade of the First Methodist Church stunned him with its loveliness. A few parishioners, known to Harold through his wife, were decked out in their Sunday finery. A robed Bill Fleischer, silver-haired, tall, and large-handed, communed with a small circle of his flock on the church steps. His wife Marge beamed beside him.

Thea drove into the blacktopped parking lot. “Once again, Dawn is nowhere to be seen.”

“She’s a grown woman, Thea, not the pastor’s daughter you remember.”

“She knew her duty then, standing by her father and mother on Sundays. Then she went off to college and lost her faith.”

“Her parents respect her wishes.”

Thea turned off the ignition and pulled out the key. “A fine mood you’re in today. Are you trying to spoil the morning?”

“No, I—”

“Dawn Fleischer is a trial to her parents. They’re proud of her degrees in education and they’re happy to see her do well at the high school. But for all her pretended innocence, I’ve heard stories about her. About what she does at night and where she spends her weekends.”

“Shall we go in?”

Harold had chanced upon Dawn Fleischer in the stationery store a few weeks before. He had helped her find highlighters and engaged her in a few moments of warm conversation. In spite of his fifty-five years and her twenty-four, she had revived urges long dead. Hers was the kind of beauty that didn’t depend on skin or shape or the size of her eyes. For one mad instant, she made him want to leave Thea. But that was folly indeed. He knew it then; he knew it now. Still he wished Thea would stop tearing Dawn down. For once, he wanted her just to shut up, follow him obediently into church, and take her place beside him in the front pew.

“Seems a shame for such an innocent little girl to be corrupted by the big world,” said Thea, sotto voce beside him with her clutch purse swinging in her hand. “But they say the face of evil can be beguiling indeed, concealing the worst of sins behind a pleasing exterior. Oh, hello, Kathleen dear! Sandra, what a lovely dress! Good morning, Reverend Fleischer, Marge. Harold and I were just talking about your darling family.”

“Nothing untoward, I hope, Madame Mayor,” the pastor joked, and everyone laughed.

“Oh, Reverend, you’re such a kidder.”

Harold shut the rest of his wife’s jabber out. How good the sunlight felt, fresh air riding in on a breeze. It was a shame to have to move inside to worship God when He was so clearly present, and richly so, in nature. But, when came time, Harold allowed Thea to slip an arm through his and draw him proudly through the church doors.

*****

Her dad laughed. “Unfrown that brow, June, or your mother and I will think you’re not glad you’re home.”

June gave him a wry smile. “Sorry.”

“Always the serious one,” he joked.

Her mother, about to remove June’s breakfast plate, set it down instead and hugged her from behind. The peach-fuzz of her mother’s chin tickled her cheek. Then a kiss, a “Love you, hon,” and she was free, delighted at the warm confines of the embrace, but liking her freedom more. She still felt unsettled and a little thin-skinned about her last days at camp, crying like a schoolgirl even as she tried not to, Jeff blushing beside her, barely able to speak.

“I doubt if you remember this—you remember it, Anne, right?—how when June was three she loved to dance up a storm to West Side Story and I told her the plot—”

“Yes!” said her mother.

“Whenever I put the record on, she’d get that same wrinkle in her brow, and ask ‘Tony dead yet?’ after every song, and I’d have to assure her that Tony was just fine, that he wouldn’t bite the big one until the end of side two.”

“Well, Dad, I may have seemed too serious about things to you. But life really isn’t a cakewalk, when you come right down to it.” June sipped her apple juice.

“She’s got you there, George.”

“She does?” He grabbed at his chest, holding his coffee cup steady at chin level with his other hand. “By kibble, she’s got me! I ain’t long for this world, ma. My own flesh and blood, for so you have often protested she is, hath struck me to the quick. This life—”

“Dad!” June let her exasperation show, but it was as drawn out and ineptly histrionic as the death speech her father now delivered between pauses for coffee.

“This life, which until this very moment I had always thought the quintessential cakewalk, that most elegant of dances, beside which the finest minuet is as the tromping of loam-footed peasants . . . this life, I say, is now revealed to me (sip), not by indifferent Dame Fortune, no, but by she to whom I have bequeathed all I have in this world—if it should be that my beloved spouse fall by the same blow, as now I fear she must, that takes her worthy husband to his unworthy death (sip)—as not a cakewalk, not that most beloved of dances, but as some unnamed something else, a vile writhing of the body too terrible to name, or not a dance at all (sip) but some nullity too terrible to contemplate.”

“Okay, it’s a waltz!”

“Mine eyes grow dim, mine ears wax exceeding—”

June’s mother laughed by the sink.

“—but I hear her, my murderess most fair, speak of walls—the walls rise gray and smooth and tall as a tunnel tottering on its end, I at their bottom falling deeper as deeper they fall, their rims thrusting upward as upward they thrust (sip)—”

To her mother: “He’s losing it.”

“George dead yet?” her mother volunteered. That broke it up, her father almost losing his coffee through his nose.

“Good one, Anne,” he said, holding his throat from the sudden heat of the swallow, “yep, George is dead all right, but so is that frown. It’s good to have you home, June.”

“I’m glad to be home.” And she was, even though her first time away from her parents now cast them in an odd light. They’d been strangers coming toward the bus in the school parking lot yesterday, girlish memories brought to life, every gesture emanating from them in rhythms that spoke not to what she was, but to what they believed her to be.

Now the three of them were engaged in the process of matching soil to uprooted root. Her room, surprisingly small after their drive home, had improved slightly upon waking this morning. But there were things that needed boxing away, and June had a feeling the discolored patch of paint above her bed, the hippo face, would now always remind her that she was sleeping in a little girl’s room, a place she no longer belonged, not really, not like other girls her age, not even others who had gone all the way.

“So how would my two girls feel about a drive to Lake Tahoe?” her father asked. “Spend an afternoon at Emerald Bay, take in Vikingsholm Castle? It’s been over a year.”

“I have things to do around the house, George.”

“I was going to see if Ward was free.” June watched her father freeze up.

“June,” said her mother, “aren’t there other friends you’d rather see first?”

“Ward’s a nice boy and all,” said her father. “But he’s disturbed, not at all your type. He was fine for a childhood friend. But he’s grown into an odd duck. Your friends’ parents, those willing to confide, are afraid some of his weirdness has rubbed off on you.”

June put up a fight, a civilized, respectful one. But after a few exchanges, she agreed to wait a while to see him. She told them she’d be ready for the family trip in an hour.

Then she went to her room to phone him, at least talk to him, see if he too had turned into a stranger. Or if (and this she hoped) the way things were matched the lie she had told Jeff Balunis when he led her to their tree by the lake and told her it was over, that all this time he’d had a girlfriend, at first he wasn’t going to tell her but she was so nice he had to, he really liked her, and he was sorry he hadn’t been honest with her. She started crying then but Jeff didn’t touch her, even though she wouldn’t have minded. She pulled some Kleenex out of her hip pack and let her tears, cool from the lake breeze, soak them. When she regained control, she told Jeff she too had a boyfriend. His name was Ward. He was wonderful. And she was sorry she had been “mutually deceptive” in not telling Jeff about him, but now everything would be okay because she could go back to Ward, and Jeff could go back to what’s-her-face, and they would cherish the memory of what they’d had and wish each other well from a distance and it would always be this special time. Then she broke down again, and she could tell that Jeff knew she was lying about Ward.

But for all of Jeff’s almost-fifteen wisdom, and as gentle as he’d been in taking her all the way, even then she knew that her lie was somehow no lie, that casting Ward in that light just long enough to invent a tale was not an idea her mind wanted to let go of. It felt too good, too right, to throw off. It felt, if she cared to admit it, like the truth.

This closest friend of hers, whose meeting was almost her first memory, whom she’d confided in, who had shared his invisible companion with her as she had with him and then as both of them had with the short-lived Shy Friends Club, who had lain with her for hours the summer they were seven beneath the treehouse oak, hearing his grandfather bellow from the treetops, tossing below the brilliant discards of what was to become Unicornucopia, a three-months’ blistering wordbrawl distilled into three hundred scintillating pages—this peculiar Ward could well be her intended.

Maybe it took absence to awaken fondness.

She flounced onto the bed and reached for the phone. Her heart pounded as the digits beeped. A ring, the interruption of the next ring, suspended time.

“Hello.”

Oh. A breath. “Joy, hi.”

“Is that . . . is it June? You’re back!”

“Yes, as of yesterday.”

“Great to hear your voice. Ward’s missed you a lot.”

Her forehead felt hot. She imagined that Joydrop could see her cheeks redden. “Is he there?”

“No, he went for a walk. I don’t know where.”

June tried to be casual about the news but it disappointed her. She asked after everyone else, said she’d had a great time at camp (which was true), and took Joy’s bemused promise that she’d let Ward know she had called.

Her sweaty ear peeled off the receiver. She imagined Joydrop Heartline, a pouch of magic rocks about her neck, giving a girlish giggle at the ways of children.

Let her laugh, thought June. Laughter, her kind anyway, had never hurt anyone.

*****

On Ward’s walk south on Bedford Avenue, half a mile to I-50 and City Hall, Timothy had flitted all over the street, goof upon his face, a brood-hen swell filling his chest, a drunken swagger to his walk.

Ward did his best to ignore him, neither smiling nor laughing. But they were both giddy over dropping in on June.

Just past Mother Lode Medical Center, June’s former house on Pleasant Street jaunted by, and Timothy started leaping rooftops, trampolining from shake to lawn, diving like a darning needle through the drivers of passing cars, balling himself up to bounce from hedgetop to roof, unwrapping his sphericality just in time to set foot upon shingle and start all over again.

When he thought there was no one about, Ward spoke a few words of encouragement. Once, these earned him the stare of an old man sitting on a porch with a lap blanket as gray as the siding of his house. But though it seemed to take forever to shake free of that stare, they did it at last and enjoyed a good laugh about it.

Things sobered up once they crossed the I-50 bridge and passed the town square. Mr. Haskell was there again. Ward mechanically returned his wave, but he skirted around the square to avoid being waylaid into incoherent conversation.

There was nothing he could do for the poor man and he didn’t want to jinx his visit by having to take in his rancid-cough-medicine breath or the porcupine stubble on his chin.

Ward avoided Timothy’s admonishing look until they were a few blocks down Main Street and had turned onto Benham at the post office.

Sometimes he went with Grampa to mail a manuscript. Grampa had a favorite clerk, Ms. Rutherford, long red hair fanning out on either side of her face, late thirties with a harnessed chest, but really friendly in an empty sort of way. Ward had watched her lower and fold the flag at day’s end. He was surprised to discover today that her house was the pretty, well-kept one with the long bed of daffodils (she looked up from it and smiled, waving her trowel) just a few buildings along Benham from where she worked.

Kind.

“Too bad she’s not married,” said Ward. “I think her husband died when I was in third grade. She’s the first person I knew—well, kind of knew—who had anybody close to them die.”

Deaf mute.

Timothy wasn’t referring to Ms. Rutherford. The phrase “deaf mute” was useful shorthand for anyone who wouldn’t understand why Ward was talking to the air. He saw a tourist couple on the other side of the street, a well-dressed man and woman. A map was crumpled partway open in the man’s hand. They ignored him in favor of the tour they were taking, which was fine with him.

As they neared June’s street, sand began to seep out of Ward’s legs. Heartblood thudded in his ears and his underarms tickled with drops of sweat.

Ridiculous. He’d played here dozens of times.

Ulterior rose.

“Right, old buddy.”

He’d never had anything but play in mind before. He’d never had a box from Perrini’s in his pocket, pressing against his outer thigh with every step. Phillips Court felt as if it lay in wait. She lived in the sixth house along the left, across from the DeSario family, which always made Ward fear for her safety.

Even so, he walked down the right sidewalk now, a sheen of sweat saddled on his upper lip. He took tentative steps, stopped, what if she’d seen him, a few more steps, maybe they weren’t home, garage door shut so he couldn’t tell, no, there was a standing lamp lit by the couch beside the picture window, no one visible.

Cross over.

What if her parents yelled at him, threw him out? What if she didn’t like him any more?

“Maybe tomorrow,” Ward said, turning to go.

A heavy door opened like an axe chop behind him, noise of TV on too loud, people arguing, the DeSario house, Big Mike. An invisible hand scruffed hot at his neck, recalling his fear that day when he’d stood up to Big Mike in the cafeteria.

The memory revived as he turned: Ward’s assigned table of six, Joey Russo sitting opposite him for a week of punishment, away from his gang, not all that bad when you got him alone. But now Calvin DeSario’s big brother hunched in Ward’s seat, a black t-shirt across his broad back, and Ward’s warped sense of justice pushed him to confront Big Mike with You’re in my seat, again once ignored You’re in my seat, Big Mike about to say or do something when Mr. Burke huffed over to order Ward’s nemesis back to his own table, Big Mike’s olive eyes fixed on Ward, then gone, Joey Russo wearing no mean look or anything, just repeating You shouldn’t uv done that to Big Mike.

A hand on his shoulder spun him around. It was Calvin.

“Hi, Ward. Hey you want to—?”

“Calvin, Jesus you scared me, I thought it was,” he glanced at the house, “your brother.”

“No, Mike’s not home.” Calvin had been close to Ward in elementary school, once belonged to the Shy Friends Club in fact, not because he himself had an invisible companion but because he tagged after Len Frome, like now he mostly tagged after the kids in his big brother’s inner circle at school. Scootling an acorn with his foot, he said, “Mike and Patti Singer are . . . they’re off somewheres. So you want to come in and play or something?”

Timothy tried to dissuade him, but Ward put Calvin’s nervousness down to embarrassment about his home life. He had heard that Calvin’s father, a guidance counselor at school, could, for all his dressing up in smart clothes, let slip some fairly crude remarks—more whispering at this stage than anything the kids let the teachers in on. With a son like Big Mike, who’d been held back twice and was maybe seventeen but in ninth grade, neither one of the parents was likely to be a prize.

Anyway, it would give Ward time to regather his courage. He’d play an hour or so with Calvin. Then without stopping to think about the consequences, he’d march across the street and ring June’s doorbell.

“Sure, Calvin. Let’s.”

*****

Look at him, you asshole, Calvin admonished. All this talking a blue streak, he’ll run away before I can get him upstairs. Mike’ll beat the crap out of me.

I’m lower than shit anyway, leading a kid who used to be my friend into a trap. But like Mike says, it serves him right for getting on his bad side in the cafeteria and for spouting all that crap about guardian angels in sixth grade.

Screw me for telling about that at dinner. But I thought it was weird and would train the spotlight on me for a change. Yeah, they got two minutes’ yuck-yuck out of it and went right back to ragging on everybody.

Mike? He wore his mean look after dinner and pumped me for details. He didn’t like Ward’s bullshit about his angel being perfect spirit and the body being a repository for wickedness—I had to look it up, but that was the word Ward used. Mike didn’t like that one bit. He said the squirt was fucked up in the head. One day he’d straighten him out, he ever got the chance, Mike grinning with that wrinkle in his lip.

Calvin held the door for Ward, smiling out of nervousness. “My room’s upstairs,” he said above the din from the TV room. Dad’s remote-hopping had landed on some frigging AIDS documentary with that joker from Auroville who’d made it big on CNN, that Luke guy who had once dated Mom—and now she and his dad were scrapping about whether or not frustrated nigger faggots in Africa had buttfucked monkeys to get the thing going.

“This way?” Ward said, pointing upstairs.

He nodded, thinking he was going to blurt it out but not doing so, then pistoned up the stairs, hearing Ward’s shoes pound out a shuk-shuk rhythm behind him. This’d get him in good with the gang if anything would, get out from under the kid-brother image. And Mike had promised not to hurt Ward any. Only fuck with his mind. Do him some good ultimately, snap him out of the invisible-friend shit. It had been great stuff when they were eight or nine, little dumbfucks who didn’t know any better, following good old Len Frome around like he shat gold bricks. What a dork he’d been then! No more.

Calvin smelled his brother’s cigarettes. He wondered if Ward would catch wise, bound down the stairs two at a time and out of the house before Mike could leap from the bedroom and collar him. They stopped in the hall. His room was on the left, Mike’s on the right.

“Which way?” asked Ward.

He tried to turn around, but only got partway before he gestured right and went toward the door. “Over here.” Mike had the radio on and up, something with a hard beat.

“I like your house.”

“Thanks.” Still not looking at him. He opened the door a crack, a little wider. No Mike. Just Mike’s bed all crumpled from him and Patti, half of Mike’s dresser, and the window, blinds drawn against a savage light. He stopped on the threshold, stepped aside, pushing the door open further and feeling behind it the soft resistance of bodies. “You first.”

“Wow, what a cool room!” Ward walked right by him, clean as you please. Then the force of the door bent Calvin’s hand back enough to sting, and he saw Mike swing his friend around and raise a switchblade to his eyes, terror in Ward’s face mixed with ice-water surprise. Patti was just emerging into view, saying “Don’t hurt him,” like an anxious momma. Then Mike flashed a look that told Calvin to fuck off and slammed the door on him with one kick of his boot. No scuffle, no screams or cries.

Calvin stood there a moment, then decided he didn’t want to be upstairs for a while, maybe for hours. Maybe he’d hang out in City Park for the afternoon, give Mike lots of time to have his fun and kick Ward out, so Calvin wouldn’t have to look at him after the betrayal.

He walked downstairs as though on eggshells, muffled music above, the voice of Luke what’s-it on TV caught in a shouting match with his parents. As he reached the lower landing, Dad looked up from the TV room.

“Hey Calvin, boy, c’mere,” he said. When Calvin paused, he tossed the remote onto the couch and strode forward. Dad waddled like Charlie Chaplin on steroids, like Calvin sometimes caught himself doing in storefront windows.

He cradled Calvin’s head in the angle of an arm and walked him over to the front door for an intimate moment. “You looking in at the keyhole up there, trying to catch a glimpse of the prize?”

“No, Dad.”

“That’s Mike’s prize, that firm young meat. Patti’s one choice heifer, isn’t she? But your prize’ll come along quick enough, and I’ll let you boff her up in your room just like I let Mike boff his prize in his room, a reasonable dad to my boys, not like my dad to me, all the skulking around I had to do. You hearing me?”

“Yes, Dad.” A grunt would have done fine, any sound to launch his words where they were going anyway.

“Fat old fart gave me no guidance.” He gestured to the TV. “Things’re different now. Us DeSario men, we got to protect ourselves when our drives kick in. I showed you the stash of condoms in the upstairs bathroom. You carry one in your wallet at all times, right?”

He nodded.

“Keep it fresh. Throw out old crushed ones. They dry up, they get brittle, change it once a month, I don’t stint when it comes to my boys’ health. One of these days you’re going to figure out how to get a girl’s cherry, or hell, you’re a handsome kid, she’ll offer it to you sweet as you please. But when the time comes, you need to roll a frigging condom down over your dick, hear me? Always, always. She can seem ‘first time,’ but you never know. Some jig could’ve slipped in before you, dirty turd-plug, I don’t know what they see in them, I swear, could’ve shoved up there, jizz coming out and leaving AIDS germs behind, now she’s a carrier, but my boy’s not about to catch it. Sleeve it, Calvin, you’re in control at all times. You have it handy, pop it on all the way down to the balls, then poke away all you like. Sure you feel a little less of her, but you last longer and both of you will like that, give her some of that thick DeSario meat to fill her up, take it slow and last a long time so when she’s with some other jerkoff later, all she can think about is how good you were, how much of you there was, how hard you stayed. Girls remember that sort of thing, hear me, Calvin?”

“Yeah, Dad, I hear you.”

“Good boy, good boy.” There was a dry patch of skin beside his father’s nose, white flaking over raw redness. “Now get the fuck out of here, go play while you’re still a kid, and remember what I said.” Shoving Calvin against the door harder than he seemed to realize, he turned heel and headed back into the din of the TV room.

2. Flesh, Faith, and Fame

Sunday morning was Carver Haskell’s favorite time of the week. The town backed off for a nice long stretch, lazing in bed. The cars threading along Main took their time, not like the pressure-cookered raring-to-go barrel-through during the rest of the week. You could see it in their faces, in how they responded to your waves. Miracle of miracles, for an instant they would unfist their money. The Friday afternoon frenzy to get to Tahoe was long over, and those few drivers he saw were nicely relaxed, as slack as downtown itself.

City Hall was an abandoned beehive across the way. Sunlight glinted off the marble of the County Courthouse. Years ago, coming in off I-50, its facade had caught his eye. Fay’s too.

Carver lifted the bag to his face, damp crinkle, and found the cold glass lip of the bottle as sure as a babe-in-arms homes in on a nipple. Oh sure, it pickled his pia mater, and made reality ripple some. But he never let the swallow turn into a habit. No, he brought himself right up to it, hesitated so slightly that no one else would’ve noticed, let the mantra speak in his head, die Carver die, and splashed the liquid gold down his throat, one more bullet in a slow fusillade that was taking him down.

He had learned how to sell insurance in Iowa. There he met Fay waitressing at a bar, the day he sold his first million-dollar policy. Ames, he said to her, was an okay place to grow up in, but the winters were impossible.

No, he was off to California. He’d find the perfect little town, put down roots, and do his part to protect the businesses and families he found there. But hey, wasn’t she a beautiful slip of a thing—Miss Fay Melissa Smith—and wouldn’t she like to marry him and come along? Because he believed he was deep-as-the-Pacific-Ocean in love with her and he could tell by the sparkle in her eyes she felt the same way about him. She sat down with him, her red change pouch bunched up and jingling in her lap. Grasping his hand, she said yes, yes, she would marry him.

So he dropped his salesman’s act for a moment and said he really meant it, so she should stop pretending because his heart would break if she didn’t mean it. Yes, she meant it. She thought he was cute and full of life, and she hated being a student, her parents made her, but she never felt so appreciated as she did at this moment, she wasn’t pretending at all, he was right on the money about her loving him back.

Another belt, a hard knot going down. A wash of fire seared his gut. She’d been all pretense, year after year. Even birthing little Tommy, feigning love for their son. What a nuisance the boy must have been when she snagged a new conquest and needed to . . . he whipped away from the image and went into a coughing fit, hawking up sputum onto the walkway beside the bench.

A swoop of pigeons landed near the gazebo. They knew him. No breadcrumbs from the bum, not since he fed them once and found they refused to make eye contact. All take, no give. Now they kept their distance, just like the folks he had sold insurance to. Take away the forced smiles, money in the palm, slick bills sliding one against the other, and the true distance between people made itself manifest.

A car door slammed. He hadn’t noticed anyone drive up. Must have been while he was hacking. Tom’s wife come for her Sunday visit, gone big in the belly. Sarah would sit there, as far away on the bench as she could get, his Tommy not giving him the time of day, and that alas was tolerable. Sarah, on the other hand, came from a close family, obliged one to the other.

But when he looked up, startled by the brisk tap of unSarahlike footsteps, Tom was striding toward him, dressed absurdly to the nines in coat and tie, black shined shoes and a long steel-gray trenchcoat flapping below his knees. Though he was only twenty-two, he tried to look thirty and succeeded. There was anger in his eyes, that and shame, and he started talking before he reached his mark in front of the bench.

“Sarah sent me or I’d never have come.”

“She all right?” The words came out bleared. “She okay?”

“Look at you!” Tom paced. “If Sarah hadn’t prepared me, I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve lost weight, you stink like the dickens, you’re caved in with self-pity. You think I like being the son of the town drunk? Because that’s what they call you when they think I can’t hear.”

“They can go to hell,” he shot back. There was too much Fay in his son. Carver didn’t so much mind being berated, it didn’t matter worth shit. But the rhythms—it wasn’t just a trick of the whiskey—brought back that day last April when Fay had dropped her pretended love and blasted him with loathing. She had scooped him out, left no skin on his bones, no guts worth preserving.

“Sure, let ‘em all go to hell. Easy for you to say. But I’ve got to live in this town, at least a few more months.” Tom looked around as if Auroville were about to leap on him. “We should have got out while we could, but I didn’t want to do that. I thought if we stayed with you, took you in, gave you the support you needed, you’d come around.”

“I don’t need anybody’s help.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that often enough: It’s my life, keep the hell away, I’ll do what I damned well please with it. We backed off like you wanted and now everyone looks at us as if we’re scum. Listen up, Dad. Once the baby’s born and Sarah’s had a reasonable time to recover, we’re getting out.”

“Just like Fay—”

“Leave Mom out of it! You’ve got one more chance. This is it, you come with me now, let us take you in and sober you up—”

“She was a stinking whore. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But she smiled and smiled and then she took all my money and went off with some cocksucking son of a bitch. God knows how many others she had—”

“Get the hell off her, I won’t listen to this!” Yes, Tom was agitated too, Carver felt it, it riled him up as much as it did Carver, her leaving, deep as betrayal goes, no way to ward it off, no way to guard against it, just get it out in the open and pray that it heals.

“She’s filth. For twenty-five years, she wrapped herself around me. There wasn’t any part of my soul she didn’t press up against. We were one flesh, one heart. Then she up and yanked it all off, twenty years and more of shared life turned to shit. I’ve got nothing, Tom. I am nothing.”

“You’re blubbering, Dad. I can hardly understand you. No, you don’t need that bottle—”

“Keep your hands off, don’t you go grabbing that, or I’ll—”

“All right, all right,” he said, backing off. “I’ve had it, that’s it, goodbye, have a swell life.” He turned and walked away, his stride slower than it had been but no less resolved.

“YOUR MOTHER WAS A WHORE!” It stung his son. Carver watched it land between his shoulder blades. Suddenly his coat whirled about, and the boy with the Fay-anger in his eyes loomed up and grabbed him by the shirtfront, one hand raised to strike. Instead, he held his father’s bawling body up for an instant, then let it collapse to the bench. A finger in his face. “I’m going to find her some day, or find out what happened to her, and then, if you’re still alive, you’re going to eat what you said!”

Carver Haskell’s face swam with tears and with it the whole bleak world, the dark tunnel of this life that urged him to drink his dwindling commissions. And when he wiped away his tears, his son was gone.

*****

“‘Upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.’ Acts 12, verses 21 through 23.”

Reverend William Fleischer gazed out over the small gathering, trying to read the mood of the faithful this morning. Back where the deacons staked out their usual positions, Ernie Blackwell held a door open for Sam Stone, who was weighted down by a tipsy stack of gold and plush velvet offering plates.

“Now this was Herod, ruler of Galilee, once Pilate’s enemy but drawn into friendship with him over the persecution of Christ,” he began. “It was Herod the ruler of Galilee who gave his step-daughter the head of John the Baptist on a whim. A ruthless man.

“In today’s lesson, we have seen how, through the miraculous intervention of an angel of the Lord, Peter escaped Herod’s grasp. Chains fell from his wrists as his hapless guards dozed. The gate to the city, a massive thing of iron that took four soldiers to move even with its system of ropes and pulleys, opened of its own accord. And Peter passed through to safety, found friends who helped him flee to Caesarea. Benevolence in the angel of the Lord. Kindness, compassion, a depth of love against which all shackles and fortifications must surely give way.”

Reverend Fleischer paused. Ken Jefferson, his assistant pastor, sat off to his right, near where the shimmering green sea of choir robes sat listening. Ken rubbed his nose and returned his ebony hand to his lap. He was a handsome man with a booming voice and a conscientious nature. He’d go far.

Still, when he talked to Ken sometimes, even on social occasions when the wives stood beside them gaily chatting, Bill spotted something in Ken’s eyes, heard inflections that hinted at events in his past which might not square with the married facade he presented. Thanks be to God he himself had grappled with that problem long ago, purely theoretically, mind you, and found those sorry temptations a mere mirage. He glanced down at the next index card on the lectern.

“Some might say: Reverend Fleischer, angels have a place in paintings. They look lovely on the cards we send at Christmas time. Their serenity gives us great comfort. But surely angels are not real. They are mythical only, a storyteller’s device, a source of strength to early Christians who knew no better and wanted desperately to believe in miracles . . . but not relevant to today’s world.

“Not relevant. To today’s world.”

He gave the repetition a sarcastic twist, checking on his touchstone parishioners the Gladstones and, back a few pews, Tilly Mason, whose head nodded and whose thin lips scissored whenever Bill scored points against the world: Bull’s-eye thrice over.

“Well I’m here to tell you, dearly beloved, that I live in this world. I believe in science. And I believe in angels, though I am too much of a sinner to see them with these fifty-nine-year-old eyes. I can’t do it by myself.” He let it echo. “It needs a community of the faithful, supporting one another, to bring back the angels. Or rather to remove the cataracts from our eyes. They are all around us. They are here right now in this lovely church building, had we but eyes to see.

“‘Build it and they will come.’ That’s what Kevin Costner was told in that miraculous movie a few years back. If we could but clear a space for the angels of the Lord, if we could plow back the worldliness, lift the shield of faith against the onslaught of distractions that flood into our lives, they would come to us, my friends. They would come in great numbers.”

He had them. Despite years of sermonizing, the way it came together never ceased to amaze. Ensconced in his study at home, he’d tap into his deepest longings and jot ideas onto three-by-five cards. The ideas he came up with seemed at times a madman’s ravings. But he had learned to trust himself, discovering that, in the pulpit, his sense of conviction would nine times out of ten carry him through. At this instant, he truly believed in angels; for the moment, this was all-important, though tomorrow, he might with the same degree of earnestness find himself standing next to Marge, scrutinizing a display of lettuce heads at Safeway.

“Now you might say: How nice that would be, Reverend Fleischer. What a comfort it would be to watch angels flitting about, to feel the brush of their wingtips against our foreheads as a gentle reminder when we misbehave or are tempted off the path of righteousness.

“But I say to you, my friends, it is urgent that we commune with the angels of the Lord. Wipe clean from your minds the mild creatures on a Hallmark greeting card. Fix instead upon the death of Herod.

“He was a ruler, a tetrarch, the ultimate power in Galilee. They dressed him in finery. They led him with great pomp to his throne and felt the force of his words. And on that day Herod made no misstep in his oration; the eyes of his listeners lit up. As in love with himself as he was, on that day his self-love knew no bounds. Picture Herod here before this altar, a man in his prime, elevated in gem-encrusted splendor. You are his adoring crowd of admirers and he has roused your passions to such a fever pitch that you join your neighbors in calling him a god and not a man. You wash him in praise. He has made you feel important and you are returning the favor. It’s the high point of his life and of yours as well.

“But suddenly a creature not described any further than to say it was an angel of the Lord appears, and the angel strikes Herod for his presumption, strikes him so decisively, that he is at once worm-eaten and dead. How terrible that angel must have looked. Was it so huge as to bump against the high ceilings of the palace? Did it glower the crowd into madness? Behold. The exalted ruler falls from his throne. The trappings of power drop from his head and arms. His flesh sprouts pale, eyeless worms. He putrefies as you gaze upon him, all his finery encasing . . . nothing but a corpse. Can you see it? Do you feel the horror of that moment?”

He had gone overboard. He would hear from Tilly Mason about this one, a stern aside. He would apologize to her as usual, and she would as usual accept.

“Yes, angels will be a comfort. But they may also be a terror. God knows this world needs both. Can you say for sure which sort of angel will come to you? Herod knew not God, he refused to know Him except to reject Him, to mock Him in the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. You are more fortunate. You know God, and you have faith in Him, remembering always, I hope and I pray, to give what glory falls into your life to God. If together we believe hard enough, then I believe the angels will come. Let us pray they come not too late to save humankind from its own folly, its self-love, its presumed greatness.”

He folded his hands, hearing the rustle of cloth and the crack of a few necks as his flock humbled themselves before the Lord. When all was still, he prayed.

*****

At first, Ward thought he would faint. His head began to seethe and pound as Big Mike vised his arm, the knife-blade so close to his face he didn’t dare struggle. Timothy went wild, flitting everywhere, unable to fix on a form. As Ward’s knees buckled and he was thrust backward, a chair came up to meet him, slamming at his back, and Big Mike’s stream of sounds narrowing into words he could understand: “. . . your hands. You deaf, sucker? Put ‘em behind the chair or I’ll cut you a new mouth.”

“Don’t hurt him, Mikey,” said Patti.

Ward said, “Sorry, I . . ,” and let the rest drop, glimpsing her standing behind Big Mike, her hands a-flutter, worry lines on her forehead, her mouth working a wad of gum. Ward’s knuckles knocked against the curved armrests as he hustled his hands behind the chair. Don’t worry, don’t worry. Timothy hovered at his left, more ghost than angel, but his efforts to find a shape seemed to be working. “Take this. Hold it on him,” Mike said, entrusting Patti with the switchblade.

“But I can’t—”

“Just do it!” He scooped up something from the bed, a thin tie whipping about, dark blue with stripes of red, and a bathrobe sash, pilled in places. Cool cloth sawed at Ward’s wrists, rough hands pinning his arms against the chair while Big Mike tied. There was an oppressive smell in the room, nothing Ward could identify but it held his face like a moist hand. The bathrobe sash whipped around his chest and drew tight, the chair lifting off its front legs with Big Mike’s exertions. It was hard to breathe. Past Patti, beyond the bed, sat a switched-off TV tube looking like a fishbowl shiny with night. “That oughta hold him.”

“Can I put this down now?” She held the knife awkwardly at her side, careful not to let it touch her. She wore a brown leather skirt that broke above the knees and a tan sweater tugged askew from being buttoned wrong.

No call for alarm, stay calm.

From behind, Mike’s left hand gripped Ward’s jaw. Was he going to break his neck? Then his right cheek frosted and burned with the sudden smack of Mike’s right hand. His ear stung where the blow caught it.

“Give it here,” Mike said, a cool breeze as he passed by. For someone who didn’t work out, Big Mike was stocky and tightly packed, a faded black t-shirt veeing into his jeans behind a wide leather belt. Looking straight into Patti’s eyes, he clicked the knife closed and tossed it on the bed. Ward saw a pink bra hanging on the bedpost, hints of nipple beneath Patti’s sweater.

Big Mike slid behind her. His hands met at her waist. She rested her arms on his, hooking her fingers through Mike’s fingers and leaning back against his neck. Mike’s eyes locked on Ward. “Hey, jerk-off,” he said, “you want to grow up real fast?”

Apologize. Timothy didn’t look at all sure it would work. “Please, I’m sorry about . . . about the cafeteria, I wasn’t thinking straight—”

“Fuck that shit.” It sounded like a moist frog croak coming from his mouth. Patti’s ice-pink lips moved to the rhythm of her gum. In her eyes, curiosity mingling with concern. “That stuck in my craw, all right. But what got you noticed in a big way was all that guardian angel shit. You make a fool of my brother, I come after you.”

“But I didn’t—”

“He was eight and tagging after Frome. Fuck it, that was okay. Wimp kids want to believe in the sandman, fuck ‘em, they’re kids, know what I mean?” He undid a sweater button. “But you spout that shit when you’re eleven? Christ, Keeshan, I gotta wonder about you.” Another button. Patti raised her hands but he brushed them off. Her midriff, flat and firm, peeked out. “You’re what, thirteen?”

Ward nodded. “Tomorrow.” It was hard to get it out. The air stifled. The bathrobe sash hurt his chest. There seemed no leeway at his wrists.

“I bet you still see angels, right?” Another button eased out of its hole. Mike’s hands now met across his girlfriend’s belly, his fingers dishragging the sweater.

“Mikey, don’t.” Patti whined like a child.

He ignored her. “Well, Keeshan?”

Say no. Ward glanced at Timothy, looking worried and pale. “Just . . . just my own. Look, my arms, I won’t run away if you just—”

“I don’t see no fucking angels.” His hands clenched the sweater below Patti’s breasts. From the look in his eyes, Ward was afraid he might take up the switchblade again. “That’s cuz angels don’t exist. Didn’t your doctor-momma never tell you that? No angels, no Santa Claus, no fairies except for faggots.” His hands relaxed, started unbuttoning again. The sunless undersides of her breasts smiled from beneath the angles of her sweater.

“Mikey.” Gentle pleading. “Stop.”

“You want to see an angel, I’ll show you an angel.”

The last button popped open and Mike’s hands peeled the cloth back and away. Be strong. Ward gave Timothy a look of panic, moisture on his forehead. Patti tried to tug her sweater back on, but Mike wrenched it off and dropped it to the floor, wrapping his arms around her. He whispered in her ear. Her body swayed as he did so and Ward felt thick and earthen at the sight of her. He’d stolen glimpses at magazines. They’d been bad enough. But the reality, moving before him, was overwhelming. It’s all right. But the distance in Timothy’s head-voice alarmed him. Ward turned to find his companion pale, wavering, panicked himself.

“I can’t do that,” Patti pleaded. “C’mon, Mikey, let me cover up. This is embarrassing.” Her hands went to her breasts, but Mike pushed them away.

“You’re my girl, you do what I say.” He took a nipple between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, tugging down until she went to her knees, one leg, then the other, her hand on his thigh for balance. She hid her face from Ward, jawline flexing at her bubblegum, and placed a hand on Mike’s zipper. It sounded like a toy race-car lazing down a stretch of track.

“Take a good look, Keeshan,” Mike said, eyes as black as olives. “There’s no spirits in this world. Only bodies mixing it up, hitting or cutting or getting it on, and you can fuck that angel-devil shit—do it, Patti—cuz that’s bullshit. It’s all just happening, Keeshan, and getting shit to happen’s what it’s all about; no gods, no devils, just flesh moving around.”

“Timothy, help me,” Ward gasped under his breath. A pink bubble inflated out of Patti’s mouth, pushing Mike’s purple thing away. He’s wrong. It was a struggle to hear him. He seemed to be breaking up, like Princess Leia bending to R2D2. One continuum, spirit and flesh not disjoint, all spirit. Ward’s alien flesh was blood-stiff and disgusting. Not alien, seeds of life, flame and fuel, hear it, listen to me, the flame needs the candle. Patti drew the pink bubble back into her mouth, blew another. Timothy shrank in at chin level. Pinching himself off at the neck, he squeezed up into Timothy-as-flame, down into Ward-as-candle, a naked Ward, all beautiful, even the penis—stiff and bowed above its new-tufted hair—part of the whole, all fodder for the flame. And the flame, though it sat on top, whickering at the dark wick, sank roots deep into the candle straight to its base, making it glow brighter and warmer than pumpkin light. Yes, you see! And Timothy grew strong again, strong in voice and vision, seeming to be more distinct than before, though Ward supposed it more like health returning after long sickness.

“Lose the gum,” Mike said.

But Patti grabbed her sweater and moved away, yanking out of Mike’s grasp. “I can’t, I won’t.”

“Come back here!” Mike went for her, but she had the door open and shuddered closed before he made it halfway across the room. “Fucking bitch.” His hand went for the knob. He looked back: “No bullshit, no screams, or you’re one dead motherfucker.” Then he left, slamming the door behind him.

This way. Timothy twisted about to suggest hand struggles. Ward mimicked his movements and found the tie more yielding than its angry knot had at first suggested. Even with the sash limiting him, Ward was able to free his hands quickly. Hurry. Taking a full breath was impossible, but Ward found that if he exhaled as completely as he could and husbanded his movements, he was able, again following Timothy’s lead, to work the right side of the sash up to his shoulder and past it, the sudden release of tension like a stretch of twine worked around the corner of a parcel. He tried to stand but tottered into the chair from the exertion and lack of oxygen, loud voices coming back, hurry, calm it down, a glance at the switchblade. No, he could never pick that up. From the shouting in the hallway, even over the blast of music from the tape player, Big Mike had clearly grabbed Patti and was yanking her, protesting, toward his bedroom. “Get the fuck in there!” Ward heard, then a door slam and a doorknob being rattled, the pounding of an angry fist. Now, Ward, do it now. He bolted from the chair and ran for the door, Timothy swirling majestically about him. He swung it back and tore off left, not stopping to locate Mike, just finding the stairs and barreling down them, letting the banister guide his moves, fearing grabs at his collar, the sudden choke of a neck button. But no, there was nothing rushing up behind him, nothing impeding him, just the downstairs angling up, a front door and freedom coming closer, Timothy’s yes! in his ear, and something, someone, heading him off on the left.

“Hey, what’s going on up there?” Mr. DeSario, a fat red face, then a smile as he recognized Ward. “Wait, I know you,” shaking a finger. “Keeshan, Ward Keeshan, the angel kid, right? But what’s . . . how come you’re . . . I could have sworn you were glowing. My eyes must be pooping out on me.”

“I don’t know, sir. Please may I go?”

“Oh sure, sure, no problem, I . . . there it is again, I swear. What is that, a freaking flashback? Some kind of aura? You use fluorescent soap or something?”

“Bye.” Ward went for the door. Daylight opened to him. Mr. DeSario’s voice moved off: “Kitty, you’re not going to believe this . . .” But the chunk of the door sealed him in, and Ward took off on a run, putting as much distance as he could between him and Big Mike.

Halfway home, the shock of what he’d undergone caught up with him. He found an empty playground and collapsed into a black swing, his arms raised along the chains, his chest hitching, tears moist upon his cheeks. Timothy, wise as ever, offered empathy though he understood that venting was needed and let it happen. Ward had never felt closer to his companion than at that moment.

*****

Not bad, not bad at all.

“Oh, don’t rub it in,” grumbled Grampa, better known to his readers as T. E. Jameson. “It would have worked just as well my way, and you know it.”

Grampa felt her impatience. She had branched upward and to his left, not that he could see her (hearing her spout off in his head all the time was quite enough), though he’d tried focusing on her from time to time and found it too much like staring at a painting that’s both landscape and face: dizzying and unnerving. Thalia triumphs over the thought goons, topples the law that forces books, once conceived, to fruition, then jettisons the novel germinating in her mind? What kind of an ending is that?

“It could have worked if you’d cooperated. Instead, as usual, you’ve got this raft of bees buzzing in your bonnet—do you wear a bonnet, by the way?—”

—I’ll never tell—

“No, I thought not—and what do we end up with: In true, wimpy, bestseller fashion, Thalia—whom, I must tell you, I absolutely adore—”

—thank you—

“—decides, because she is now indeed free to choose, to subject her brain to the bloat of gestation and see the book through to completion anyway!”

So?

She could be dense. “So it’s the same damned formula used by every trashy TV show and movie we’ve had the misfortune to see: Come out foursquare for free will, but heaven forbid your main characters should ever decide that heavy petting is for them; or that psychoactive substances can be both sacred and sexy under the right conditions; or that Christianity is fine for other folks, but atheism and a brush with a pagan fertility rite or two suits them to a tee. No, they can only flirt with the vast anarchy of the soul if you have them turn away at last and find true happiness and the utter contentment of bland bovinity in their own backyards—bah, humbug, and balderdash!”

You’re beautiful when you’re angry. A dark blot of a beetle backed with lemon-yellow spots ambled along a twig to his right.

“I’m beautiful always, Esme sweet. You too, and don’t you forget it. My fans don’t know the half of it.”

They love your mind, not your body.

“They are wise folk, that’s for sure. But if only—”

—never, put it out of your mind—

“—I had the guts to insist—”

It’d kill your career. Let it be posthumous, and one or two generations down the pike.

Grampa, having saved the final edit of his epilogue to both hard disk and floppy, exited WordPerfect, shut off the laptop, and swung the dead screen down upon the keyboard with a dual click. “You fought me every step, didn’t you, on that novel: my night-time, six-year, in-the-treehouse-instead-of-above-it masterpiece.”

Thank God it’s done and out of your system.

“The book’s got balls.”

Yes, yes, and every other bit of private anatomy, male and female, many times over.

“It’s young Oedipus fresh from Delphi, for chrissake. It’s Corinth, a seaport. The Temple of Aphrodite with its thousand sacred prostitutes. It’s the Festival of Demeter the fertility goddess, tangled up with Laius and Jocasta’s state visit, Oedipus pussyfooting around his supposed mom and dad, and all kinds of incest, bedtricks, and babyswaps in the mountains of ancient Greece.”

Right.

“Yes, I’m tired of arguing about it too, tell you the truth.” Yanking out the orange extension cord, he wrapped the plug in a baggie secured with a twist-tie, and tucked it into its Y of branches. From there, it ran like an orange artery down one thick oak branch and, secured at irregular intervals with electrician’s tape, at last disappeared behind the treehouse roof. “I’ll start printing Thalia of the Swelled Head tonight—that is the title we agreed on, yes?”

Ugh. It’ll do for now.

“Darn tootin’ it will, toots. Anyway, you can bet that my editor and her new flunky, that Leon guy, will hit on something better, if better there be. One quick read per chapter, adjust the pagination, print the sucker off—you’ll be there looking over my shoulder—?”

Comedian. As if I have a choice.

Slipping the laptop into its black carrying case, he brought the twin zippers about and together. “I’d guess eight hundred pages of sizzling pot-boiling prose. We ought to be ready to mail it Thursday morning, take three days to celebrate, then Monday, we can decide which idea on our shortlist will be our next millionaire, Mike.”

I knew John Beresford Tipton. He was a friend of mine. And frankly, Grampa, you’re no John Beresford Tipton.

“I’m also not your grampa,” he said. “That’s Ward’s honor.” Shouldering the laptop, Grampa eased out of the padded hammocked lawn chair and found his footing on the neighboring branches. The rustle set off a bird or two, leaves exploding outward with wings and diminishing bird bodies. “It’s clear how you’re related to me and what I’d call you if I didn’t know your name—”

Made up a name, you mean.

“—but it’s not so clear what you’d call me.”

How about Museum?

“Apt, I guess. Old, stuffy, plenty of intriguing relics on display.” Grampa paused to look beyond Esme, a leap over his neighbors’ homes into untouched wild and, past that, hints of an apple orchard. Above, riots of bifurcation guided his eye along leaf-laden paths into heaven. Below, and it never ceased to thrill, the plunge of one misstep at once terrified and tempted him, the soft grassy swirl of earth a crippling fifty feet down through a freefall slash of branches.

Ten years had passed since June’s Uncle Art had faced the challenge of constructing a fully self-sufficient treehouse, twelve since Nora’s lapse into catalepsy. Yet as bone-deep as the climb from crow’s-nest to treehouse had become, he knew the tree was ever poised to surprise him, and sixty-five was sixty-five no matter how you sliced it.

He took his time descending, a man in no rush whatsoever. A solid grip, a firm foothold, the supportive lean of a thick branch. He would stop and savor them, feel the texture of bark, breathe the sweet smell of sap and green leaf and living oak. This was what his millions were good for: letting him live the bulk of his life up here above the fray, pursuing and pinpointing his dreams, arguing full-voice with his muse like a crazy man (he knew how they talked about him and cared not in the least about it), wrestling the right squiggles of ink onto the page so that his harried readership could deny their dreary lives for a few days and be with him in spirit, where hissing treetops kissed the sky.

Grampa’s tennis shoes touched the roof. He found the rope-handle to the trapdoor, raised it, and slipped inside, lowering and latching it as he descended the floor-to-ceiling ladder into his study.

A bright room. The skylight and two generous windows saw to that. One of the remaining walls was nothing but workspace, a blonde laminate table with room for his PC, his LaserJet, the laptop, a CD-ROM drive, a modem, a tape backup unit. The last wall was stuffed, shelf upon shelf, with books and folders, back issues of odd journals, and the effluvia of a career thirty years old and counting: four tiers of first editions, U.S. and foreign, and signed limiteds—from Elf Bane, a debut he could still be proud of, to Dragon Toast, about to deluge the stores, already the featured selection of umpteen book clubs, guaranteed to sell tens of millions of copies and bring him the usual flood of praise and fan mail. Nice. But after the twentieth time—hell after the twelfth—it was more like a warm kiss on the cheek than a zap of energy that stole away your sleep for days, the illusion of love and support was so convincing, and so necessary at first.

Grampa fired up his PC and unzipped the laptop. Too much a business. Another book, another nine million. The trap of being T. E. Jameson. Four shelves of albatross.

Need me?

Body tremor. “Jesus, don’t do that!” His heartbeat claimed his attention for half a dozen rapid throbs. Esme warped the air between the printer and the doorway to the living room: rich clear glass, there and not there.

Sorry.

“Take a hike, will you? You’re forever pulling this crap on me. I call, you come. Simple as that. I don’t call, you stay the hell away.” But she drooped in shame and was gone halfway through Grampa’s outburst, which he felt foolish finishing but finished anyway.

He thought about her as he transferred the file to his PC and then copied the entire THALIA directory to a second disk, this one to go into Joydrop’s safe (Maxine Hong Kingston had lost a finished novel to the Berkeley fires two years before, and Grampa had taken the hint). Muse talk had been in the air early in his career, and in those days, when he’d mingled more with other fantasists, he jokingly called his Esme. Vaguely poetic; formed a nice pun (is-me); and reminded him of Esmeralda, which recalled Maureen O’Hara, his favorite actress growing up. But once he named her, she had taken on voice, a whisper to begin with, then more distinct.

At first he resisted her, confiding in a close friend who had seemed true but fell away to monger rumors about him in the writerly community. He took a gamble, did an if-this-be-insanity, plunged full-fray into conceiving and birthing A Sunlit Wood with Esme, and saw the gamble pay off the following year in soaring sales and royalty checks he thought at first must have been misdrawn.

Now Esme was no big deal, nothing extraordinary, unless he stopped to think about her in so-called real-world terms. If he regretted anything to do with her, it was the fallout on his grandson, who had clung far too long to his invisible companion Timothy and taken some heat for it at school. Ward was a fine caring boy. He kept meaning to do more with him, go fishing or something else of a grandfatherly nature, but those plans seemed never to come to fruition and Ward spiraled a football up in the air or kept to his clubhouse, June his only friend.

Grampa checked his shelves: Thalia called for two reams, but he had only the open packet for correspondence, and that was down a hundred sheets. Hand on the phone, he decided to spare Joydrop the bother and retrieve them from her office himself. As he crossed the sunlit living room, he glimpsed Auroville in the distance, touristy but not tacky, still small-town enough for his fame not to matter much. It had been a stroke of good fortune, coming here in 1980 to help their daughter through the last month of her pregnancy, his wife Nora still normal then. He was suddenly there again, happy to see Laura of course, but coveting at first sight the tree, huge, ancient, majestic, inviting, its sturdy arms begging to loft him high above the world. Even then, he began to see how the house would sit. He had kept that vision—then a pipe dream—private, which made his daughter’s invitation to stay all the more miraculous when it came.

Through the circular cut in the balcony flooring and down the anchored rope ladder he went. The ground when it came up to meet him was always so solid . . . for all its soft grass, a hard harsh platform of clodded stolidity. The incline leading up to the house, though slight, seemed ever a penance, partly because of his wife’s unwavering stare, but mostly because gravity reclaimed him, reminding him of his age and his insignificance, making him pay for the time spent above it all.

When he slid open the door to the kitchen and slipped through, he heard the flush of a toilet, a short burst of sink water, and the opening of a door down the hall. Joy looked startled to see him, then relieved and happy. “Hi, Ted,” she said, an alto flute to her voice. “The sky god descends. To what do we owe the honor?”

“Good news, Joy.”

“Thalia’s wrapped?” Her pleased astonishment every time was always real, always a treat.

“Tight as a fish.” He held up the floppy, reverent as a communion wafer. “A gift from the gods. I went up into the mountains, well actually it was that old oak out back, and returned with these millions of magnetic ons and offs—”

“—the divine yeas and nays—”

“—precisely, in just the right combination to flood our coffers and keep us both in clover for eons to come.” They shared a laugh and she hugged him, nothing romantic, just nice and friendly and by now an expected ritual. “I need two reams of twenty-pound.”

“No problem.” As she passed Nora’s door, he thought of his wife in there, in the silence. Then Joydrop was in the hall again, the wrapped paper in either arm up against her chest like Mosaic tablets, and the front door opened to let in Ward.

“Hi, Grampa. Hi, Joy.” He headed straight for the fridge, avoiding their eyes, and began to assemble a lunch for himself. Joy went to help, stacking the paper on the kitchen table, but Ward said “I can do it” in a tone that conveyed uncharacteristic exasperation.

Grampa, about to chide him, held back. There was an odd feeling lifting off Ward where he bent to fetch yogurt and bread and peanut butter. He stepped into the kitchen near where Joy stood, and for the flash of an instant Esme appeared, filling the kitchen, gently clasping him in the warm grip of love. He could see her, straight on, and she was beautiful, smiling just a hint, and larger by far than the role he’d confined her to for so many years. Then she was gone, memory lost, a mirage, and he started breathing, audibly, without realizing he had stopped.

“You all right?” Joy touched on his upper arm.

He looked at her, her face glowing with goodness, and nodded.

“You’re sure, Grampa?” Now Ward met his eyes. He was a joy to behold. How had those years slipped by so quickly? They grew, these children, every phase a marvel, each one forgotten in the wonder of the next.

“Yes, Ward. Thank you, I’m fine.”

Ward tore off a banana, then slid the door wide enough to squeak through, hove it to behind him, and was away to the clubhouse, the cloud he’d carried into the house still upon him.

“What happened?” Joy asked.

“Hm? Nothing, a tremor, something lovely. Nothing like a stroke, stop looking so nurselike; that’s better, no, it was a kind of blessing, a benediction—well, it is Sunday after all.”

“Okay.” She put a hand to his forehead, feeling for fever. What a find she had been. Somewhat flighty in the head, given to crystals and magic rocks, but the perfect secretary and with the credentials and caring to provide for Nora’s needs as well. He couldn’t have asked for a more ideal helpmate.

“How is she?”

Joy paused. “As always.”

His impulse was to return to the treehouse. “Leave the paper here. I think I’ll go sit beside her for a few minutes.”

“I’m sure she’d like that.”

Grampa nodded. He turned, going through the TV room and down the hall. Too gloomy, he thought, we could use a brighter bulb in this hallway.

Then his fingers touched the doorknob and it turned clockwise and he took in the high-backed chair and his wife sitting in it, staring out the window like a doll stuffed with sawdust.

3. Easy Love, Tough Love

The next morning, June told her parents she was off to the library, after which she would probably meet Sharla Kraft at the movies. Probability zero, she thought to herself, easing the lie. Her dad gave her a spy novel and a book on railroading to return, but that was okay. She’d meant to hit the library anyway, see what they had by Wilhelm Reich. It was still cool for shorts at nine, but the day would warm up and the walk would invigorate her. So shorts it was, sandals, a peach blouse, and her hip pack, fluorescent green, worn in front like a kangaroo pouch.

The library had little Reich, but June scanned the Britannica entry, checked out a paperback copy of Listen, Little Man, and requested through interlibrary loan three other books, including Fury on Earth, the biography Jeff had raved about. Then she crossed I-50 and started the winding uphill walk along Bedford Avenue past restored Victorians and up into less populated country, the sight and scent of forest and field delighting her senses.

Ward hadn’t said much on the phone. She got the impression that beneath his enthusiasm at hearing from her lay resentment at having been summoned to the house for her call, as if he were cocooned, undergoing a sea change, not pleased with being torn from his chrysalis. But that might have been imagined. It was more likely the hovering of his grandfather’s secretary that had made Ward sound that way.

Mariposite Lane welcomed her at the left, a gentle rise in the road taking her past a neighbor whose mailbox bore the name “Grant” but whom she had never met. Ward said he was a shut-in with plenty of money and ill health, who had crews come in to beautify his lawn and garden but never once to his recollection ventured out to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Over the rise: a languid hundred-yard paved road through sparse forest to Ward’s house, the ribbon of road surging around a stand of spruce as if it continued for miles more. As the house grew near, she saw through the picture window Joy sitting on the couch, facing away, her head bowed in shame or prayer—no, she was reading a book, the flick of a fingertip as she turned the page. Then the sound of June’s sandals on roadbed made its way through the screen and Joy turned, a glow to her face, an upraised hand as she twisted on the couch and rose. June returned her wave. To Joy’s “Hi, June!” she shouted “Hello!”

Joydrop enthused over her as usual, but more so out of long absence, the air pleasantly tight with quick hugs and usherings, bird-flutters in her hands and her voice, how was she, how did camp go, was she glad to be home, and her attempts to answer cut short because Joy understood she was here to see Ward, not her. Even as the questions bubbled up and the enthusiasm spilled out of her mouth, she sheepdogged June through the house to the kitchen door and out, waving again and then making a point of vanishing so as not to seem a snoop, which June knew she was at heart. But that was just Joydrop and right as rain with her.

June turned. There was the massive oak and its amazing treehouse that looked as if it had been extruded from the tree itself. And there upon the ground to its right sat the clubhouse, a woodchopper’s hut straight from faerie, or more precisely her Uncle Art’s best guess as to what such a hut might look like.

But no Ward.

She approached the clubhouse, the dew from the grass cool on her toes. No noise from inside, no noise from the treetops. But then Ward had told her that his grampa’s new novel had gone from knockdown-dragout mode into print-and-ship.

For a moment, she felt absurdly like a little girl in a fairy tale. Uncle Art’s gingerbread shingles, overlapping like the coverts on an eagle’s wing and stippled with bright knobby gumdrops, had held up well under eight years of weather. She ran a finger over the scenes of celebrating elves—the Maypole dance, the barleyfield harvest, the defeat of a lumbering red-toothed ogre under tempestuous skies—and found the mage-head at the center, the iron ring through its septum now resting on its chin-plate. She gave three soft taps, metal on metal, knowing how well the lightest rap carried.

The door unlatched and eased open. There was Ward, looking taller than she remembered. He said something. But her attention remained on his face, a warmth in his eyes at once piercing and enveloping. Then his words coalesced: “June, hi, come on in.”

“Sure, I . . . sure. Um, it’s good to see you.” She stepped into the warm woody embrace of the room, feeling whole and serene in this place where the best of her childhood had passed. “You’ve changed. Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Thanks. You look great,” he said. “I have?”

By instinct her body found the cushioned rocker, its assertive arms making her feel queenly as she molded her arms to them. “Yeah, there’s this neat way your face kind of glows, I mean it’s not just your face, but—”

“I don’t see anything.” Ward glanced at the mirror over his dresser. “Someone else said—”

“Well it’s not like it’s visible, exactly. It isn’t like a nightlight, or fake vampire-teeth.” Her hands flailed. “More like the light on a field of daisies when there’s hardly any moon.”

“I don’t get it.” Ward rested an elbow on the dresser top. His other arm seemed at a loss until he put his hand in his pocket.

“It’s hard to explain. I don’t even know how much of it is you and how much me. It’s subtle too. But it’s there. There’s um . . . a completeness about you that you didn’t have before, the way you’re standing there, how you’re looking at me, even that self-conscious smile. And somehow it’s linked to something inside me.”

Ward shrugged. “If you say so. I don’t feel any different from when you left.”

She raised her arms and hooked her fingers over the back of the rocking chair. “It’s great to be here,” she said after a long sigh of contentment. “Remember when us five used to sit in a circle on the carpet?”

“Len was more a lounger, but yeah.”

“Right, I meant ‘sit’ loosely. Given these fat throw pillows your mother made, those of us who couldn’t prop ourselves up against the bed shifted around a lot, on our bellies or on our sides. Then Angela moved to San Diego.”

“I don’t remember her much.”

“I do,” said June. “Blond pigtails she used to whip around a lot, lion-faced barrettes, dresses with bows in the back. Her voice had this pleading edge, almost but not quite a whine. And her companion, she said, filled this room like a huge marshmallow, warm and toasty and a better friend to her than any of us could ever be, even though—I can still hear her nasal voice—we were very good friends indeed.”

“Right!” said Ward, animated. “His name was Opie. Now I remember. He’d roll around under her feet as she walked, a squirrel inside a beach ball. His face looked out and in at the same time, right in front of her about basketball-hoop high. It was, what, four years ago that she moved?”

“More like six,” said June. “Middle of second grade. She hugged Mrs. Hancock and cried. I wrote to her a few times. She sent a Christmas card and that was it.”

“Good old Angela,” he said. She echoed him, and then he said it again with comic exaggeration and they shared a laugh. When it was over and they lapsed into silence, she asked, “Is Timothy still here?” trying to make it neutral, hearing the anxiety she hoped to mask.

She wanted him to have chosen, these weeks she’d been away, to have abandoned his stubborn belief in Timothy, as she’d given up Jeannie when fifth grade began. Jeannie had been a godsend, growing up, and it was fun sharing her with the Shy Friends Club. But there came a time when she was more pretend than real. When Len left, Calvin close behind, she told Ward she no longer believed, which he had taken much better than she thought he would.

“Yeah, he’s right beside me, leaping all around. He helped me out of a jam today.” His voice trailed off. Then he started on a different tack: “It’s such a relief to be able to talk about him.”

“What happened?”

“Some other time.”

“Why’s he leaping around?” It felt right to keep talking about Timothy as if he existed, and there were times, what with Ward’s eye-cues, that she fancied she could see him. “Usually isn’t he just, you know, sort of beside you, pretty quiet, absorbed in what you’re doing?”

Ward’s fingers jiggled at the drawer handle. “He’s firing off all sorts of neat thoughts about you in my head, like how super you look and . . . and that sort of thing. So. Did you have a good time?”

“At camp?”

Ward nodded.

“Yeah, it was great. We went horseback riding twice, and we swam and rowboated on this perfect lake. We camped once in Yosemite, cold beside a mirror of water where the air smelled like vanilla extract, which almost made up for having to do crafts. It was fun and a half.”

“Bet you made lots of new friends.”

She rehearsed her cabin mates and counselors for him, mentioning mostly new girlfriends, but a few boys in with them, Jeff included. But he went by pretty fast, so she figured no special freight had attached to his name.

“We got you a homecoming present.” Ward opened the drawer he’d been fiddling with and something white appeared in his hand. A box. He squatted by the rocker, still a funny, kind-of-awkward thirteen-year-old. But his skin was smooth and his hair lay just so on his scalp and he seemed backlit by the glow she had commented on. How perfect he was, oddities and all.

“Open it,” he said.

“Um, okay.” She undid the band, which he pocketed, a brush of fingers in the exchange.

“Hope you like it.”

“I’m sure I will.” The corners of the box were crimped but the lid came off okay. “Oh Ward, it’s neat. It’s like they shrank a real rose and froze it tight. I don’t know what to say.” In the pause, she ran a finger over it, aware that Ward was looking at her, that he was so close she could touch him, that he was her boyfriend, not Jeff, and she’d been blind to it. “Jeez, Ward, you shouldn’t have. You’re the one with the birthday, and I don’t have anything for you, except to treat you to the movie. Thanks. It’s darling. Let me try it on.”

“That’s okay.” He was embarrassed, which she thought was real cute. “It’ll look great on you.”

She left the rocker and stood before the mirror. “The chain is so delicate.” She unclasped it and brought her fingers up under the tumble of hair. In the glass, her breasts lifted. The white rose slid along her blouse, seeking its proper place. “Can you reach the clasp? I can’t do this for beans.”

Ward came up behind her and took the ends from her. Then she brought her fingers up under her hair and exposed her neck. She could only see a little of him in the mirror but he had that fire about him still, less like a glow than the silent snapping flares of the sun’s corona at eclipse. She felt it tingle along her back like beach sun beating down. His fingers played and fumbled at her neck. Frustration grunted out of him once or twice, but his fingers relaxed and she heard a click. Then, incredibly, his lips bent to her neck and ineptly kissed her just above the clasped chain.

June turned to him.

“I’m sorry, I—”

She hugged him. Tight. His arms went about her, uncertain at first, then relaxing into an embrace. She kissed his neck, his chin. Then his mouth came down to meet hers, and his lips were as soft and warm as nestling doves. This was much better than Jeff, whom she’d always thought of as “in charge,” him being fifteen and almost a tenth grader. But with Ward, it was like perfect equals meeting, her best friend of eight years becoming something more. She felt enveloped by love, shy complete love that sparked similar feelings in her.

They broke the kiss. Ward hugged her too tightly but let up at her oomph. She gentled at his ear, “You’re a pretty special friend, you know?” Sunlight filled the room, but she felt surrounded by dusk. Her eyes played tricks: the radiance of Ward’s body, sparklers in a black July night dancing at the edges of her vision.

His whisper went to her heart: “I love you.” A real gamble, even now. He had completely opened to her and lay exposed, fearing her rejection; she felt his fear, and how much he adored her.

“I love you too, Ward.” She voiced it softly at his ear, pressing fiercely into him. He smelled amazing this close, and the corona of his love licked at her skin and made it sizzle. He gave an ohh. His tears she wiped with her cheeks, laughing in delight, and their lips came together again. She was woozy, heady with the richness of it, a naked swim in warm cream. Never had it felt this lovely with Jeff, never, not even when he touched her everywhere and made her go wild.

Taking Ward’s hand, she walked shyly with him, twisting the mini-blinds up tight so that the sun laid thin fierce lines along the meeting slats. The clubhouse cooled as she sealed it up, still early morning in the Sierra foothills. Ward’s space heater, set on high, put out ripples of orange heat, a high soft hum that scoured their ears. A haven, June thought, our home, Ward’s and mine. He’ll be all right with it all. He won’t question where I learned it, or else he’ll be too much involved to think about it until later.

She led Ward to the bed, eased her sandals off, undid the crushed hip pack, and sat beside him, kissing him all aglow. “Unbutton me,” she said, whispering close to his ear because it would have felt awkward looking at him.

“You want me to?”

“How does Timothy feel about it?”

“He’s going crazy.” They shared a laugh. “In a real nice way. He says it’s totally different from . . . well, from what it might be like if I didn’t like it. I’m not making much sense . . . oh, come here.” He propped a blue throw pillow against the wall, sat back and drew her up into his chest, facing out into the room. As her blouse tugged free of her shorts and Ward fumbled at the buttons, knuckles brushing her tummy, she closed her eyes and felt as though she were sinking into a hot bath. When she opened them, it seemed as if she lay back against toasty flame, casting shadows on the far wall. Her body tingled with joy. She wondered at the profound difference between her summer boyfriend and Ward, almost as if Jeff had been the final chapter of her childhood but this new Ward was a transformation leading straight into maturity. If this was true love, no wonder they sang songs about it.

“I guess we’re not going to the movies,” he said, his hands tentative and tantalizing about her bra.

“Do you want to?”

“No, I’d rather keep doing this. You’re so warm and beautiful. I could hold you forever.”

She arched back to kiss him, one hand at the side of his head. A sleeve fell open at her wrist. Sparks darted in the depths of Ward’s pupils. “Let’s get rid of this.” She turned to face him, kneeling between his legs. Her blouse shrugged off and away. Attacking his shirt, she kissed downward as button after button gave way. His hands sculpted the back of her neck, her shoulders, the symmetry of her shoulder blades beneath her bra straps. “Can you undo it?”

“Um, I think so.” He got it first time. Blind luck. June rose so he could ease it off.

She’d never gotten used to this moment with Jeff, but with Ward, her vulnerability opened in complete trust. She felt radiant herself, as if heat and light emanated from her core, fountaining outward at her breasts. Ward’s body looked now like videos she’d seen where scratches of light outlined dancing singers, only she couldn’t be sure her own excitement wasn’t affecting her vision. Weren’t there cones or rods that fired off, and mightn’t they overload at moments like this, basking a boyfriend in backfloods of imagined light?

Ward gasped. He told her he couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. Then they toppled over into embrace, the unencumbered warmth of their chests planed together. The clubhouse, cozy despite the kept-out sun, cupped them like divine hands. This room had been a place of fantasy for them for years. Countless times she had stretched out on this bed, her hand propping her girlish head. Now it was about to bind them in the sweet reality of intimate love. But Ward, for all his embraces and kisses where he lay beneath her, his body twisting in amazing light, was clearly virginal. It fell to her—so a high faint voice inside her prompted—to take the lead.

She broke the kiss, kissed his cheek, again, and put a hand on his belt.

“Should we?” he asked.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she said.

“I love the sound of that word.”

“Hush now. Lie still.” Sweet Jesus, she couldn’t be imagining the halo of light, a streetlamp in fog, at his head, nor the way it seeped away from him like fluorescent moss on a tree. And it seemed to be catching: Her hands, working at his belt and zipper and shrugging his jeans off, glowed like the hands of a praying bust. Mingled with the high hum of the space-heater were new voices. Imagined, surely. But then who could say what truths grown-ups knew about what really went on when two people came together in love? Or maybe they didn’t know; maybe the real thing was so rare that when it happened, people pretended it didn’t, denying the divinity of the light, denying the voices.

When Ward was naked, she laughed at how lovely he was. Jeff’s hands, moving everywhere, had made her feel whole, not some disjoint being created by bits of cloth. She did Ward the same favor now, showing by touch what the light coming off him proclaimed as well, that from top to toe he was divine and unified, that his penis—as funny and exciting and obligingly stiff as it was—was just as much him as his legs or his shoulders or his head. She knew he was ready when the intensity of his body-glow began to ebb and flow at fever pitch and when his hands left off loving her breasts and started fumbling at her shorts.

“Be right back,” she said.

The hip pack lay on the floor. She zippered it open, found Jeff’s leftover condoms at the bottom, and tore one off. A ring finger and pinkie trapped it against her palm as she peeled off her shorts and panties.

She’d heard talk of afterglow, but this foreglow was amazing, this benignly radioactive skinlight she and Ward shared. She was a walking ball of luminescence. Light seemed to emanate from her bones, her blood, her spirit, bringing with it shifting whispering voices. Ward waited in a haze of pulsing light. She went to him, tore open the foil packet, rolled the condom down over him, and straddled him—needing him, taking his love all the way inside, touching herself as she rode him because he was tensed to explode and so was she.

Radiant joy welled in her, the voices rising and becoming one voice, somehow a familiar voice, light and airy. Wisps of light broke and snapped upon Ward’s body and hers as she felt the onset of orgasm take her. She lowered herself into the light that pulsed about her true love and felt his embrace above, his thrust below. Ward, cresting too, looked deep into her, the adoration in his eyes unbelievable, infinitely mirroring her own for him.

Then he made his sounds, so plaintive and sweet that they carried her over the top and she mixed them with her own, certain that the light’s intensity would ignite them. Instead, as she lost herself in ecstasy, the light took form. It swirled into articulation, two forms beside them on the bed. And Ward’s eyes went to them too, trying to focus on the coalescing light.

What June heard then was the elusive sound of a syllable that was both June and love at once. What she saw seemed less like ethereal creatures forming than like something that had always existed: a rebirth of what had once been hers as a girl.

She saw rippled color. Limbs shifted out of two bodies, amorphous but growing less so. Soft gray eye-lozenges modulated in waxy white faces. Mouths, mingled and distinct, O’d warm and alive.

Her heart leaped. She hoped she might die then, as she recognized her own dear Jeannie: the river of canary hair, those crystalline eyes, the voice that redeemed all woe. But this was Jeannie enmeshed with another being, arms and legs multiplied and entangled, touching June and Ward where their bodies warmed each other. Somehow June’s angel was looking directly at Ward’s and also directly at June. And June guessed, no she knew, that just as the male angel (who could it be but Timothy?) had his eyes fixed on both her and Jeannie, so too those eyes and the eyes of June’s guardian were fixed on Ward.

Dear dear June.

“Oh, God,” June gasped through the spreading wash of ecstasy. Timothy mouthed Jeannie’s words too but no sound came out.

“June, is that—?” But Ward’s eyes shifted past the angels, past the miraculous stroking of their fingers on the lovers’ bodies—and June turned to see what Ward was staring at.

There, as translucent as a mirage, its head cocked to one side, a squat black front-billed cap perched jauntily over its white-feathered forehead and large rimless pince-nez secured at the apex of its beak, stood a gangly stork, fading in disappointment even as she watched it.

*****

Tom picked out three eggs from the carton in the fridge, deftly retrieving them with one hand. They chilled his palm. “Only one for you? Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Sarah patted her belly, her legs angled under her where she sat at the kitchen table. “The munchkin doesn’t leave much room. So I’m doing what Doctor Keeshan advised and having lots of little meals instead of three big ones.”

“No sausage?”

“Too spicy. Heartburn.”

Tom crossed to the stove, where butter fizzed and bubbled in the frying pan. Same old brand of butter his mom had used, same old stove, same skillet, same worn patch of linoleum under his feet. He cracked the eggs, sizzled them in at close range so as not to break yolks, and tossed the shells into the sink.

“How about Samuel?” he asked.

“Nope, there was this kid in kindergarten, never said a word, but at recess he’d swing real high and sing this song over and over at the top of his voice.”

“Sounds familiar, I probably tried him on you before. Okay, scrub Sammy.”

He crossed to Sarah. The house felt too big with Mom gone, Dad insanely holed up in a rundown hotel for boozers and derelicts. But wherever Sarah was, Tom found warmth and contentment. He stood behind her chair, laying his palms against her milk-swollen breasts. Kissing her on the ear, he whispered, “You make me so happy.” Then he placed a hand on the basketball of her belly.

“Don’t you think you should tend to your eggs?”

“Look who’s talking.”

She craned her neck to kiss him. “I love you, Tom.”

“Love you too, hon,” he said, putting the weight of the past year into it. At first, everything had gone so well: meeting each other at college, getting married, conceiving Amy (or little what’s-his-face) last December, sharing all of it with Mom and Dad.

Then in April, after a week in Hawaii, they had come back to find Mom gone and Dad moping about the house, his words tangled and uncertain, no longer the man of fun and fire Tom had grown up with.

A week later, the phone rang; Tom got it in the hallway at the same time his dad uncradled the receiver upstairs. Hand over mouthpiece, he heard his mother tear into his father something fierce, digs and swipes, where are the divorce papers you promised, wounds opening up to weep and fester, where he’d always thought healthy tissue and clear smooth skin held sway.

Until that instant, his father’s distracted dithering had been a puzzle. But there in the hallway, hearing the nexus of his family shred while Sarah whispered “What’s wrong?” over and over like a stuck needle, he felt the vastness of his father’s loneliness hollow out his head, the raw defenseless brainmeat being scooped and scattered. He shut it off, shut it out, before it claimed him too.

Then his dad had vacated the home, spending most of his time in the town square, moving out to be nearer to free space, he said. Those not part of the grapevine had found his presence there amusing at first. But as his initially engaging euphoria gave way to bitterness, as his looks deteriorated and his clothing devolved to his one favorite suit all the time and the booze began to take increasing amounts of attention, they blocked him out as the others had, skirted about him, about the town square itself, pretended he wasn’t there.

There had been coolness toward Tom, toward Sarah too. If it hadn’t been for the support of George Schneider—thank God for understanding managers—he had no doubt the bank would have found an excuse to let him go months before.

“You have that munchkin of ours, rest up, and we’ll be gone from here before you know it. We’ll go south, somewhere on the coast.”

“But I like it here, Tom,” she protested.

“You’re just nesting.”

“No, that’s not it. Your eggs are calling, I think.”

“Jeez!” He crossed to the stove, switched burners, shut the one off. “They’re okay, just some brown patches. Yolks’re solid, I’m afraid. Sorry.”

“No problem.” Tom gave her the least damaged egg, salvaging what he could of the other two for himself. She persisted: “Really, we’ve got to help your father. We can’t give up on him, it doesn’t sit right.”

“We’ve tried. He won’t listen.”

“He’s family, Tom. Walking away’s no good.”

“Do we have to get into this right now?”

“No, I guess not.” Sarah took a bite of egg, but Tom knew she wasn’t going to let it lie. “It’s just not right to let him kill himself.”

“Like he says, Sarah, he’s a grown man. He’s made his own choices.” Tom salted his eggs and sliced them with the side of his fork. But he had no appetite for them. He watched his moving hand as if it belonged to someone else. “How many times do you offer help before you accept that someone is beyond saving?”

“When it’s your father, you keep offering it until he accepts it.”

Tom’s fork clattered on the plate. “Well I wish I could be as much of a saint as you, but I’ve had it with the old man. I just want to get on with my life. I want to forget him and go somewhere else and start over.”

“I’m sorry.” He felt like a heel, upsetting her like this, but then he guessed it was mutual. “Let’s drop it for now,” Sarah went on, “but maybe while you’re at work, I’ll think about what we can do. Maybe we can map out a plan after dinner.”

He sighed. “If you like, yes, let’s.” He heard sarcasm creep in. “No, I know how that sounded and I really mean, let’s do that. But I also mean, I don’t believe anything is going to work.”

“At least you’re willing to try.” She rested a hand on his arm. “You haven’t given up hope.”

Hope. An empty word. Fruitless planning. But if it kept Sarah happy, he’d go with it until the baby was born and she could be more clear-headed about what was real and what was pure fantasy. “No, I suppose we can always hope.

“I’ll try, hon,” he said, “I’ll try.”

4. How Three Turned Into Six and One

“If this is a dream—” said Ward.

It’s not. Timothy, enmeshed with Jeannie and yet entirely distinct, like lime Jell-O bonded fractally from below to cherry, sounded at once flutier and more sonorous than before. A few years back, Ward’s mother had replaced her last-tweet, last-woof, bargain-basement speakers with top-of-the-line ADC Soundshapers; the impact of Timothy’s words went deeper than Ward’s favorite Wagner transformed by those new speakers, deeper because they mainlined into his brain, became one with the decrescendo of his orgasm, one with Ward himself, one with his overwhelming love for June Lockridge.

“He’s right, it’s no dream,” said June. “I can read his lips and Jeannie said it too. Did you hear her?”

“No,” Ward answered. June’s guardian smiled at him, mouthed a broad I-love-you, and stung him straight to the heart. He cried out. A tingling buzz tickled his ears as she spoke but no words sounded—and yet her adoration shot like pure vanilla straight into him, not apart from June’s love but rather the essence of it. “I can’t hear her, but I can see her,” said Ward. “She’s just like you described her when we were little.”

“Yeah, it’s funny, I grew up with Jeannie, not really seeing her but sensing her, maybe like a blind man senses a chair, and I wanted so hard for her to be real—but then she is real after all—that I could almost touch her face, every detail of it, in the air. And the face I devoted my imaginings to was this face, it was, even though it’s only now that I’ve finally genuinely seen her.” June lay warm upon him, confiding close, the amazing aroma of her breath mingling with the memory of her kisses. Below, she clung close about his stiffness, her belly warm against his and moving in easy counterpoint, the whole frontal heat of her body, the warm comfort of her legs against his, affirming how complete and inalienable every part of him was. Gone was yesterday’s upset, as thoroughly as he’d been spooked by what Big Mike had done.

She’s a peach.

“He says you’re a peach,” Ward said. “He’s right.”

“Thank you both.” She laughed and kissed him, then blew Timothy a kiss.

“I mean it. That was amazing. You are amazing.” Hundreds of guardian fingers treadled where Ward’s skin met June’s, slowing down like surging surf turned into a gentle lapping. Timothy had touched him only fleetingly before, but Ward could easily distinguish his reassuring caress from Jeannie’s more arrhythmic butterfly-flittings, the tips of her fingers there, a tickle, and away. Their translucent bodies were beginning to unswirl like marble cake batter spiraling backward against time.

“Ward, how can you watch these two take shape before us and call me amazing?”

“I’ve been able to see him for years, hear him inside my head too, so in one sense—Sorry, Timothy—he’s no big deal.”

Likewise. Sarcasm. Something new.

“But,” Ward continued, “I’ve thought about you for a long time, wondering what it would be like to, you know, go steady, cuz you’re so great and everything and I like you so much. But I never thought we’d actually . . . do what we just did, or not until we were lots older, and I never ever thought it would be so incredible.”

June shifted atop him, played with a curl just above his left ear. “Yeah, I’m pretty new to it, just some guy at camp; he was nice, but it’s over with. What? Jeannie says—Jeez, listen to me!—she says the whole sexual thing is pretty silly and pretty yummy at the same time. This Wilhelm Reich guy I’ve been reading about, he wanted kids to be taught all about sex as soon as they hit puberty.”

“Who’s he?”

“Some guy who died a long time ago. He thought that when our bodies were ready for it, we ought to go off to a sex camp and learn how to do it right.”

“Who with? Not grown-ups.”

“I don’t remember. That’d be pretty gnarly. Maybe sixth graders would do it with previously tutored eighth graders who were supervised by, I don’t know, responsible tenth graders or something.” June raised herself on her elbows, breasts peeling off the sweat-sheen of his chest like Fruit Roll-Ups from their backings. Jeannie hovered amazing over her shoulder, nearly completely detached from Timothy though they yet clasped quiescent hands where Ward and she were joined. “We have to be careful at this point because . . . have you used a condom before?”

Ward shook his head. Jeannie had this wonderful kind round face and smiling eyes like Melanie in Gone With the Wind, and she was confiding in June, one hand on June’s shoulder, her chin nestled in the cup made by curled thumb and forefinger.

“You have to hold it in place, so that when I get off you, the little spermies don’t spill out and sneak inside to make me pregnant. We wouldn’t want that stork to come back, although he was kinda cute.”

“Do you have to get off?”

She said yes, and then she did it, and he groaned in dismay at her leaving and held the thing on. Kleenex, said Timothy, but June and Jeannie were already back with a few torn from the box on his dresser. Ward worked the condom off like a dead jellyfish, wadding a tissue around it, and another around that, and dropping them into the wastebasket at the foot of his bed. June, propping throw pillows against the wall, patted the bed beside her. Ward knelt there, his limp penis damp against his belly when he leaned to kiss her upper arm and rub his cheek against it. Painting the air with benevolence, Jeannie proved less a distraction than an augment, an extension of June that did nothing to draw off Ward’s attention from her. The white rose rested high above her breasts. Ward touched it, a hard beautiful knot of ivory, and ran two fingers up under the chain, the space heater lightly roaring, his knuckles thrilling to the smooth warmth of June’s skin.

Kiss.

No need for a prompt, he thought back. Her face was radiant with love, her lips warm and renewing. “You know who we ought to tell about this?” The idea formed even as he voiced it, took fire, enlivened him. “My grandfather.”

“You think so?”

“He already knows about Timothy. When no one else is around, I tell Grampa what he does and says, and he takes it in stride. In fact, he’s the only grown-up I feel okay even mentioning Timothy to.”

“We wouldn’t tell him about—”

“I won’t if you won’t. We’ll just say, I don’t know, we were playing Scrabble or something, when suddenly the right combination of words came up on the board, like a magic spell or something, and it happened. He probably won’t even ask about it. We’ll just tell him what our companions are up to—we can whisper it, one in each ear—and we’ll keep it up until he has to believe us because we’ll give him so much detail, he’ll know we’re not making it up and, well, just because we won’t have that air about us, that sudden blank wall—you know how liars get.”

He saw June turn to Jeannie, a natural gesture now, a slight adjustment in the neck that might look to the blind world as if she were taking counsel with herself. A buzz again in his ears. Almost hear? Yeah, Timothy, I can. Timothy suggested in his antic air ballet a willingness to translate, but Ward turned him down.

“Okay,” said June, echoing his enthusiasm, “let’s go tell him. I haven’t talked with him in months. You don’t think we’ll be interrupting?”

“He’s in final polish, once through each chapter and then print it out. It’s okay to drop in; he hangs a sign on the door if it’s not, and besides, look what we’ve got to offer.” Ward nodded toward the companions. “We ought to barge in even if his sign is out.”

Bad idea, Ward.

“Okay,” he amended, “we’ll cross that bridge—”

“Promise me one thing?” June draped an arm over his shoulders, brought her face close, eyes beaming. Jeannie clung to one side of her, angel arms wrapped around her as if to say, This is my best friend always!

“Name it.”

“After we’re done in the treehouse, we’ll come back here.”

Ward ran a hand over her back, the warmth there, and joyed in the non-obstruction of no-clothing that made his beautiful friend undivided and perfect. “Yes, June,” he said, moon-mad with love, barraging her with yes upon yes upon yes until she stopped them with a kiss.

*****

When they were dressed and presentable, June turned off the space heater and raised the blinds. She thought her guardian might wash out in the brilliant sun, but the reverse was true. Borrowed brightness enwrapped Jeannie like coils of tight blue flame flaring about a torch, yet she did not deny June oxygen or otherwise smother her, but rather enriched the air in the clubhouse and revealed the innate goodness of everything June saw. All to reflect my love for you, she heard Jeannie say—nothing hokey about it, nothing saccharine, just deep truth that made June cry out for joy.

“You okay?” Ward asked, no alarm in his voice.

Ward senses you’re fine.

“Couldn’t be better,” June said. He was crouched to tie his tennies, Timothy not frantic but not stationary, a lazy cozy zigzag angling about his charge. “They can read thoughts. I’d forgotten that.”

Open book, Braille of the umpteen senses, adoring you from fore-edge to spine, front cover to back. An impish smile warmed Jeannie’s face.

“Given to wordplay too. I like that.”

“Sure wish I could hear her,” Ward said. Then to the swooping Timothy: “Forget it, I already told you . . . he keeps wanting to fill me in on what she says.”

“He can hear her?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you let him?”

“Wouldn’t be right. More of a barrier than not being able to hear her is. I don’t like watching dubbed foreign movies either. Same difference.” He stood up and patted his belly with both hands, a satisfied diner. “Ready?” She nodded, glancing at the mirror one last time and fluffing her hair. Then Ward opened the door and she and Jeannie moved past Timothy out into the still cool air of the backyard. Her eyes were drawn across the sloped lawn to the screened window where Ward’s gramma sat, grayed and faceless as a dressmaker’s dummy in her dim room.

Poor woman, she thought.

She is loved and cared for. She has her world. But yes, there’s tragedy there.

“Something about Gramma?” He kept his voice low on account of their proximity to the treehouse.

“It’s just that you stop noticing her after awhile, I did anyway. But she seems different now. The whole world looks different, sounds and smells too. Like when lettuce leaves, the floppy outer ones, get peeled off, and there’s this rich core of tiny moist leaves packed away inside. I notice her now, and it’s kind of sad.”

“Yeah, my mom says she used to be so animated. I’ve seen videos but they don’t look like her. All I remember is her like this, and Joy taking care of her, and Grampa sitting with her once a day, but mostly avoiding her and never talking about her. Not with me anyway.” His hand touched her shoulder.

Timothy was speaking to Ward when she turned, leaning in like a Rockwell gossiper. She laughed, then tried to stifle it.

“What’s funny?”

No need to apologize. Jeannie was beautiful in her motherly solicitude.

“I’m sorry, it’s not about your gramma. It’s about how perfect today is, and how much I um, you know, care for you, and how strange and yet right-at-home these two guys are, hovering over us like this.”

Bless you, said her angel.

Ward agreed, excited that his favorite person in the whole world could see his companion and that he could see hers. He kissed her again, a big smile thinning his lips and a shared giggle getting in the way, out there in full view of, well, of the forest and Ward’s gramma, sunlight and Jeannie’s enveloping love and Timothy’s excited swoop making the moment delicious. Then Ward, suggesting it was time to let Grampa in on their secret, walked with her, a hipsway to their sidewise hug, like drunken horses. Amble led them on, the great oak coming up to join their erratic dance. He offered the rope-ladder, one hand at the small of her back, and she carefully placed her sandaled foot on the first rung and pulled herself up, conscious of Ward at her side as her hips and legs moved past his face, and of Jeannie’s protective envelope about her body.

The ladder was well secured below and, despite eight years’ weathering, as safe and safe-looking as any rope-ladder could be.like catching it on a raised patch of sidewalk but more lethal—even then her guardian was an extension of her body’s swift reflex, the clutch, the new surge of energy in her arms, the tug upward, the recovery and continuing on as though nothing untoward had happened. A yard from her face, crusted oak bark payed out downward like slow, rough road. She found the sides of the balcony hole with her fingers and climb-tugged herself up through it, backwarding her buttocks onto the firm flooring, then lifting her legs up and around. Nice high railing, thick, protective: her uncle’s doing, all in the family. Ward’s head poked through the hole as Timothy seeped through the floorboards to reconstitute about him.

No sounds came from inside, or none June could make out; the door, though closed, was unsigned. Ward stepped up to it, Timothy sweeping near and the entire motion one unified gesture. Above, a fresh rustle caressed the high leaves, reminding her of soft surf on distant sand. Ward knocked. He turned to her, smiled nervously, his guardian whispering at his ear.

Well yes, Ward’s grampa is weird, but he’s never less than kind. Jeannie cut through her idlings like the one pure thought behind her mind’s dither.

“Yeah, but this is the first time . . ,” she found herself muttering, then finished the sentence in her head; the first time they’d ascended the rope-ladder uninvited. There was no telling what Mister Jameson’s reaction would be to that. He was a daunting sort anyway, a beefy white-haired man who looked more like a lumberjack or a retired boxer than a writer, and not at all a grown-up whose anger she wanted to provoke.

There were footsteps, fast ones, not heard so much as felt through the shuddering floorboards. Jeannie’s glance of mild alarm and the nervous look Ward shot her made her crave invisibility, or the squirrelish knack of scattering down trees, leaping earthward, and hightailing it into the undergrowth. The tumble of the turned doorknob fused with the door’s swift motion inward: it swung back fast enough to scrape wind. There he stood, the glower on his bearded face turning soft at the sight of them, and then something else came over him, a look that mingled panic and surprise and delight. But what was far more astounding to June was the tall strong female form that billowed up behind him or through him or somehow burgeoned from his head, looming up as vast and lovely as an October moon cresting a darkening rise.

*****

He and Esme had been intently at work, finding more burrs in the final polish of Thalia than they’d expected. Two walk-ons named Sarah Kent, confused antecedents up the yin-yang, word substitutions no spell checker could find; it amazed him—Esme too—how much he’d come to loathe the type of book he now wrote, but here was the evidence as he stepped back and ran through it one more time. And now in the throes of a brilliant idea about how to patch a faulty transition, a sudden knock had stunned him, scattering the idea into irretrievable evanescence. By God, he’d thought as he rose, dismissing Esme into oblivion, where the hell had that damned sign gone? He’d never needed it, nobody’d intruded for years, but then he remembered how wedded he’d become to that bit of cardboard, a snag of stifle he could do without, so one day he’d up and trashed the sucker, fed it piece by piece into his Coleman stove and he felt freer for doing so. But now, with that loud knock still echoing in his ears, he felt rage enough to reach into those ashes if he could only summon them back, uncinder them to flame, unbrown the burning pieces to white, and unshred that sign just long enough to thrust it into the face of the fucking sales-animal who’d dared to circumvent the house and Joy’s vigilance and presumed now to prep his pitch on T. E. Big-Shot Jameson’s lofty doorstep.

He had enough presence of mind to hit Save before he stormed out of the study and across the front room to the door. Eccentric? He’d show this asshole eccentric! The doorknob was chilly as he twisted it and pulled. Then the sight of Ward and June standing there turned off his anger at once, transforming that energy to the affection he felt for them both, June almost as much a grandchild to him as Ward was. But before he could say anything, a new feeling seized him entirely. It began as a dynamo churning in his gut, almost as if there were a whirring engine down there, a spinning steel top—it wasn’t nausea, not at all, though he wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if he’d begun to double over, with the racking his belly was taking. He sobbed, but then realized it was only in his head, and the sight of the two children on the balcony mingled with what he could only suppose was a stroke, the full quake after a mere tremor yesterday in the kitchen. But, Jesus lord, he thought, if this was a stroke, if this was how Death made his presence known, then let him come. The whirring swept upward, through lungs and chest, lifting off his shoulders like radiant waves and streaming up into his head so that he wept aloud now, thinking absurdly what face he’d lose for crying in front of these children, how much grist it would provide for the rumor mill.

With the weight of wonder, he fell to his knees, one hand still on the doorknob, and the sobs wracked him with joy, and the tears blurred his vision. But they did not blur it so much that he couldn’t see what his crazed mind now saw, denying it feebly, and affirming it with all the force his sense of reality could muster. For as Ward and June rushed to him, to help him, asking in distant voices if he was all right, he saw the forms made manifest about them, two beautiful presences that tore at his heart with how perfectly pure they were, the colors of them, the hint of blessing they left upon the air as they moved, the love and solicitude they showed toward their charges, separate from them but by the thinnest margin of difference, purest self distilled and all-surrounding. And then, not apart from this vision but unveiled in the same moment, the rip and rent of bliss that stirred within him silked out and up like an ethereal parachute, and there was Esme. But it was Esme as he’d never seen Esme before; or if he’d known her this way, it had been in the most ancient of his days and in some nascent form, no less pure, but nowhere near this huge. For he saw her now, no trompe l’oeil on a tree branch, but vivid as the sun, and she stood apart from him but completely enfolded into his breast, no contradiction there, or only in feeble language’s logistic limits found, at once herself and him, independent yet tied to his every move and gesture. She was his muse . . .

. . . but so much more . . .

. . . and, by God, her lips moved for the first time in her guardian guise, becoming his thought, enforcing it. For the first time in forever, he realized he’d known her in childhood. Snatches of a past he had no recollection of flashed by: him and her inseparable until, unacknowledged by his mother and father, she’d fallen away.

“We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Are you all right, Grampa?” Ward divided his stare between his grandfather and Esme, by turns cautious and astounded.

Calm them. Yes, yes, I should. “Everything’s fine, Ward, I—”

Ward, amazed, said, “I heard her.”

“So did I,” said June.

They came around him then, all four up close but not a stifle, and helped him into an easy chair. Its fake red leather seat was taped together along one side and it gave a high wheeze when his weight sank into it. Esme caressed his face.

Introductions? Her word was a stone dropped into a pond, radiant in mirror-curves outward at the surface and funneling downward as it deepened in his mind. From that one seed, her muse-voice bantered with him, a game she now transcended, not renouncing it so much as showing that it was one among many. He almost foundered in ramification, but waiting eyes—those of Ward and June and the ones who watched over them—brought him back.

“This,” he said, “is Esme. Esme helps me write books and I hope she’ll continue doing so, but I have a feeling she has other things in store for me as well.”

Right. Warmth filled her eyes, and sparks of flint. She was muscled, packed with humor and sorrow, anger and solid compassion, a towering fury tightly contained. It astonished him how swiftly he was adjusting to her in her new guise.

“It feels funny,” said June, “but I guess we’re all in this weird boat together . . . so anyway this is, well I call her Jeannie, so I guess that’s her name.”

He heard her say something like Charmed, saw her lips move. It was a glimpse into June’s soul—short, sweet, privileged, a note like pure high brass.

Ward chimed in, “I heard that too, I can hear her now and I couldn’t before. Your turn, Timothy. Grampa, this is Timothy, as if you couldn’t guess.”

He stifled the urge to offer his hand. “Timothy, at last we meet.” The kind wraith at Ward’s shoulder turned a shy face to him, blushed Big Boy red, and said, An honor, and there was no doubt, despite his clowning, that he was indeed honored.

“Did you hear him?” Ward asked excitedly.

They both said they did and that seemed to turn on a spigot inside Ward’s mouth; the dear boy was suddenly near to bursting with speech. It came in torrents: how in the last many years Timothy had grown in texture, what it had been like for him when he was abruptly able to see June’s guardian and how that had not only revealed Timothy to her but deepened Ward’s own perception of him, and how coming to the treehouse door and watching Esme rise up behind his grampa had somehow sealed his bond to Timothy further. At that, June concurred that her companion had at that moment become more a part of her, and more, she didn’t know, more securely real than before. “But Grampa,” Ward said, “what does it mean?”

He laughed. “You think I have a clue? Ward, I love you. I love you both.” He hugged them where they sat on either arm of the easy chair. “So I don’t mind confiding in you: I have no idea what we’re expected to do, or even if anyone exists to do the expecting. Esme doesn’t appear to be anything but content at the moment. I don’t see any urgency in her eyes, nor anything of the kind in Jeannie’s or Timothy’s. I don’t feel any either, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Not me.”

“So, that being the case,” he said, wondering at how easily he slipped into the role of aged mentor with these two, even in the face of the miraculous, “I suggest taking things nice and easy. Let’s follow our own best instincts and see where things lead. Unless you have other plans, I propose the three of us walk downtown to Gregerson’s for a treat, making one stop at the post office. I was about to do that anyway once I knocked off Chapter Ten, it’s become a ritual; Mindy Rutherford—you remember which one she is, Ward, the thin smiley one with the long straight hair and the garish lipstick and the prominent bosom?—Mindy loves advance warning when I’m near to mailing off another book. She gets all excited like I’m about to ship a bar of gold, which I guess in a way I am, and she loves her part in the process: weighing the sucker, stamping it First Class, and sticking Priority Mail labels everywhere, and fawning over me as if I’m Parsifal bringing home the Grail. Mindy’s in many ways the best part of writing the books.”

Ward looked uncertain. “June and I sort of had other plans, but—”

“But,” she chimed in, “they can wait.”

“Yeah, things have shifted and I’d kinda like to hang out with you and Esme here.”

“Me too.”

Something was going on between them, something new. He felt a question rise in him, but then—

Desist.

—she was right, and she was him, instinct intruding on impulse, not making him feel small despite her vastness but almost as if he were two bodies and her insight blent with his like converging binocular lenses.

“What does she mean, Mister Jameson?” An automatic question, not one she wanted answered.

“No matter. Let me save my work and shut everything down in the study, and we’ll be on our way.” He eased to his feet, not having felt this jubilant in years. Esme sailed with him like a full moon along a darkened highway, not something new but a sense too long neglected that made itself right at home where it had always been. Everywhere his eyes lighted, an astounding correctness to each object greeted him. His chocolate-brown floor lamp, seldom used and rarely brought to consciousness, tubed up shiny from the floor and arced-over its black flex-neck near his PC, its bulbed pillbox-hat head a halo of brown and white. A look at the screen was something he avoided. No point in spoiling a high. Time enough to assess the damage later. Yet he suspected, and Esme confirmed it on the spot, that Thalia’s fix would be a breeze, and that far more wondrous tales waited in the wings.

He shouldered an empty backpack shoved behind the old ThinkJet on his closet floor. It felt light now, the hand of a friend on his back, but—part of his penance—he knew how weighty it would be on the way home with the fan-flood of fame dragging at his shoulders and slapping against his spine.

“Okay, you two,” he said, leaving the study, then saw that they were by the window, holding hands. Timothy and Jeannie enstatured them, that’s the word that occurred to him—they amplified the Wardness of Ward, the Juneness of June, just as Esme, now enveloping and looming like mists of sea spray about him, amplified what he thought, what he felt, what he sensed. In love, said Esme. “I’d say so,” he said, and the children, after a fumbling break by Ward and a re-clutch by June, just beamed. “Good for you,” he added, “and by the way, I’ll be damned if I’m going to say ‘you four.’ It sounds wrong and it feels wrong. In some way I don’t yet understand, you and Jeannie are one, just like me and Esme, or Ward and Timothy.”

The guardians nodded, content to let the kids voice their agreement.

“Fine. Now let’s have at the world. After you.”

June paused on the balcony. “Mister Jameson, do you think anyone else will be able to see them?”

“Highly doubtful, I’d say. No, things somehow came together for us three because we’re who we are, more open to otherworldly things: old T. E. Jameson, the oddball; Ward here clinging to his invisible companion way beyond the acceptable time; and you, well you’re Ward’s closest friend—getting closer if I’m not mistaken; sure go ahead and blush if you like, I think it’s great—and you were a part of that club of his, so maybe you stuck with Jeannie just long enough to make her retrieval possible now. It’s only a guess, but I’d imagine this trio of ghosts is going to be our little secret from here on out.”

“Timothy isn’t a ghost, Grampa,” said Ward, catching the ladder with his feet and starting the climb down, his guardian negotiating a playful corkscrew around him as he descended. June and Jeannie went next, the latter a film of solicitude about the former. He waited until the kids were down, then swung out onto the ladder and took in its familiar sounds and sway as the underside of the treehouse diminished above him. Whereas Esme the muse had been more pest than pleasure much of the time, Esme the guardian was a joy to have about him, confirming his confidence in body motion, enspiriting his thoughts. Nonetheless, the earth was a downer for both of them and she shared the tinge of sadness he felt as he trod the ground for the first time today. He waved as usual to Nora, sitting at her window, then walked toward the house with the others.

His first indication that he’d been wrong about who would be able to see their guardians was the look on Joy’s face when the three of them entered the sliding glass door to the kitchen. She was sitting at the table with a salad and a glass of apple juice in front of her. Her fork hung in the air and she tried to speak, but it looked like her eyes were open too wide to allow her mouth much latitude.

“It’s okay, Joy,” Ward said. June, to the other side of Joydrop, concurred, patting her shoulder.

Her eyes went to their faces but could not help being drawn beyond to Jeannie, and to Timothy insofar as he kept to one place long enough to fix on. “Who . . . I mean, I, what uh . . .” and then her gaze was drawn to Esme lofting over her employer.

“You’re not going mad, Joy,” he assured her, sitting across from her and taking her free hand, as chilly as his doorknob had been. “They’re just—”

He stopped. A flit of gnats he thought he’d seen in the air above her resolved themselves into moving beads of dew strung on invisible wire—dew or tiny gems, clear and glinting, defining with their motion lines of force about her head and yet raised away a foot or more, like an airy exploded view of her skull.

“This . . . is so beautiful, Ted.” She marveled at the gems about her head. “How are you doing it?”

“It’s not me, not us. It’s you. Your guardian.”

She laughed. The crystalline framework circling her wavered, winked out, came back again. “I don’t know what you mean exactly, but since I must be dreaming, or having the most beautiful flashback one could hope for, I guess anything goes. I like it whatever it is. I feel some—I don’t know—affinity for it, for him.”

He took her hands in his, curve within curve, giving them an affectionate squeeze. “The three of us are going downtown. You’ll be all right?”

She glanced at the backpack. “Is it Mindy Rutherford day again? So soon?”

He shrugged. “I’m just a writing fool.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Nora. Joydrop didn’t take note. She hadn’t heard. “How is she?” he asked her.

“As always.”

“Wait a second, you two.” He rose. “I’ll be right with you.”

“Take your time, Grampa.”

Halfway through the TV room, he glanced back. It was a subtle change, the look on Joy’s face. She seemed like one mildly stricken. The airy sculpture of gems about her head had evaporated and it appeared that even Timothy and Jeannie had dimmed somewhat upon his leaving. A trick of the light, perhaps. Esme, after all, felt no less potent for the temporary separation. It was comforting to have her with him as he entered Nora’s room and shut the door.

There was a vaguely medicinal smell to the room even though Joy gave Nora nothing of the sort. The room seemed stuck in time, an invisible patina of dust everywhere. It had been their bedroom between the time Ward was born and the building of the treehouse. For the first eight months of their grandson’s life, they’d loved one another dearly and often on this large firm bed with its frilled spread. Then, for two years after, he’d lain, hard-put for sleep, beside her stilled body, holding her, his fingers at her unresponsive hand, hoping his warmth might wake her. His refuge in the trees had weaned him away from that time of hopelessness.

The sun lay slantwise across Nora’s lap.

Beautiful. Yes, she is.

“Nora? Hello, sweetheart, it’s Ted.” He never felt heavier, more dragged down by the world’s weight, than in his walk across this room. And Esme echoed that too. No easing to have her beside him, just a confirmation of his sorrow. He laid a large gentle hand along the right side of his wife’s face, his last two fingers lost in the silk of Nora’s long white hair. The tip of his nose caressed her left cheek, the soft yield of it, the warmth. “Come back to me, dear love,” he said. It was what he always said, and Esme though fully with him, was silent; he knew without her guidance that what he did here, what he said, was right. His lips left soft kisses along the stretched flesh of her jaw, lingering upon her lips. When he broke away to test her eyes, they were vacant as ever.

There. “Yes, I’m sure of it,” he said. “She’s close to the surface, she can hear me. You’ve always been able to hear me, haven’t you, Nora?” The eyes blinked then but there was nothing startling in that. She always complied, if soullessly, to Joydrop’s promptings regarding meals and bodily functions; in acts of dressing and undressing, her limbs moved with the suggested flow; her eyes might blink, an audible sigh might escape her lips at times, but never did this compliance seem willed, never a sign of impending emergence from the state Nora had lapsed into twelve years before. Yet he had faith that one day it might happen.

A flicker occurred on the moist surface of one eye, a feint toward a glance at Esme. He looked again. Nothing. Pure imagining. Mere eye adjustment after blinking, like a contact lens settling back over its cornea.

He knelt to contemplate the face of the woman he had loved, through good times and bad, for so long. Despite her stasis, Nora’s face, not a trace of make-up on it, as there had never been in her life, looked healthy, neither bleached nor sallow. The heart trouble she’d had fifteen years before—shortly after their stay at a friend’s cabin in upstate New York—had caught them both by surprise, but they pulled through that, and neither then nor now did she show any outward sign of that inward distress. He gentled his thumbs up over her cheekbones, again and again, trying to massage her out of the depths of her entrapment.

Time I think. Esme brought him to himself. Rising, he kissed Nora’s forehead, lingered one last caress across her face, and left the room, the hallway air rushing into his nostrils, as it always did, like sea breezes after the close air of a diving bell.

II. The Blooming of a Community

5. Monday Afternoon in Downtown Auroville

When Ward’s grampa had left them in the kitchen with Joydrop Heartline, June had had a moment of disorientation come over her. Foolish, recalling it now as they paraded single file along the shoulder of Bedford Avenue, Ward and Timothy in the lead, Grampa and Esme bringing up the rear like sheepdog and shepherdess. But then, what with Joy’s diamond-gridded guardian evaporating and the dimensional flattening of Jeannie and Timothy, her faith had wavered, had to be buttressed with assurances from Ward, indeed did not return entirely until Grampa himself returned to shore it up. Joy pleaded with them not to go, but they promised they’d be back by mid-afternoon. She’d waved to them from the picture window, again bereft of her guardian but doing her best to smile in spite of her loss.

Cars whizzed by in both directions. June had earlier voiced the fear that a startled driver might lose control and plow into them. But once past the Grant place, they’d watched a dozen vehicles go by with no more than a curious stare in reply to theirs—Grampa’d been convinced and Esme concurred that either not many folks would be as receptive as Joydrop or that it took sustained personal contact, not the sweep of vehicles past quick-vanishing pedestrians, to bring the guardians into focus—so they’d taken a right on Bedford and begun their trek into town. It took Jeannie’s ethereal gauze of comfort, several repetitions of Nothing to worry about, and the safe if shuddery buffet of a few cars and trucks shumphing past to calm her jitters.

By that time, sidewalk had begun and an odd mingle of old and new homes kicked in too. Just before they reached Pleasant Street and the edge of the business district this side of I-50, they passed a man sitting on his porch. She had seen him before—quite often in fact—on her walks to and from Ward’s house. He was chubby and balding, he had a warm glint for her always and a smile, and he invariably wore less clothing, by at least a layer, than the season called for. At the moment, although no sunlight reached him, his feet were bare and a bare chest souffléd out from beneath a pair of worn railroad coveralls. “‘Afternoon!” June said as they passed, louder and more confident than her usually more guarded greeting. But instead of the “Hi there, little lady” she expected in return, his mouth O’d like a light bulb socket and he said, “Holy . . . what in the Sam Hill . . . I . . . wait, I . . ,” his eyes not knowing where to focus, his body rising slowing from his ratchety wicker chair until his hands gripped the railing and an ancient Orientalesque figure faded in and then out as they passed by and left him wheezing in the distance, a hand to his heart. June, not breaking stride, waved back to him, and his hand rose and finger-waved like a bleary-eyed toddler.

He’ll be okay, Jeannie assured.

But how can you know that?

Trust me. And June did, increasing her pace until she was even with Ward and Timothy. She took Ward’s hand, trading smiles with him. Timothy corkscrewed around them, a jumbled dryer-window of colors, yet he raised no wind in doing so.

“Look,” Ward said. Two men in three-piece suits and a woman gripping a zippered leather briefcase against her side were working on ice cream cones and trading business gossip outside First National.

“Whatever happens,” cautioned Grampa behind them, and Esme chimed in her support, “smile and just keep walking.”

Ward gave June’s hand a squeeze. “Why do I feel like I’m getting away with something?” he whispered.

It was great to see him this excited. “Beats me, but I bet you can’t keep a straight face.”

“I’ll bet I can’t either.”

The older man, the one facing north, glanced at them approaching, then back to the woman, then, his face drawn and full of fret, slowly back to them. He said a naughty word, loud enough to cut off the animated remarks of his younger male colleague. He and the smartly dressed woman turned their heads to see what was up. June marveled at the varieties of astonishment people were capable of, but then there was suddenly much more to marvel at. For out of the silver-haired man’s taut belly, spilling like mail between one charcoal pinstripe and the next and silently inflating until it clung sluglike to his side, was a boy chewing bubblegum, freckles on its face, a blue baseball cap askew on its brow; it propped its chin on a charcoal shoulder and made itself marvelously at home. The young woman’s guardian arose less certainly behind her, a cloud of flour, vaguely female and lost-looking, insubstantial amidst her charge’s confusion. Her briefcase, zippered shut, clattered and slapped against the pavement. “This can’t be . . ,” the woman said airlessly.

“Afternoon,” said Ward, slowing. She could tell he’d meant it to come out smart-assed, but there was more awe in his voice than flippancy.

“No need to worry,” assured June, and Grampa’s large hands caught her and Ward warm at the back and propelled them gently past the trio.

“Wait,” said the man with the trim brown mustache, a twinkle-eyed pixie struggling from an invisible egg of air near his head. But they forged ahead.

When June glanced back, the pixie had collapsed into its invisible egg, and the cloud of flour had puffed away above the woman like atomizer mist. But the silver-haired man now followed them, neither rushing nor dawdling but at a respectful distance, his boyish guardian grinning ear to ear as he stretched out from the man’s body like a young pirate clinging to the foremast rigging, eagerly scanning the horizon with his glass.

“Bank clock says one,” said Grampa. “Good thing we missed the brunt of lunch hour. Let’s take Spring Street and skirt around downtown.” Turning right on Union, then right again onto Spring so they could ellipse around and cross I-50 farther west, they passed the fire station and beyond Tunnel Street the Department of Motor Vehicles; in so doing, they picked up a young housewife pulling weeds, her hair in a red bandanna and her guardian ambling behind her like a thin creature of bark; and a DMV official whose angel mimed tugging him out of the test vehicle he’d just braked to a halt.

Ward asked if these people were okay and his grampa said he thought so. When June looked back at them, the silver-haired banker waved broadly to her, then thought better of it as his guardian whispered in his ear and he let his hand fall to his side. The housewife looked like she was in heaven, but the other man, his face as sour as a pickle, was resisting everything his puff-cheeked angel said. June couldn’t tell for sure, but she guessed that that was just this man’s way, nothing brought on by their passing him on their walk downtown.

By the time they crossed I-50, turned left onto Main, and sighted the post office, they’d seen lots of guardians come and go, some vivid, others barely perceptible; behind them, the DMV guy had dropped away in a heated scowl, glad to watch his guardian lose steam and vanish; his place had been taken by two elderly ladies with purses on their arms and the barest outlines hovering behind them, minimalist pencil sketches, which managed to goad them willingly on as though they were thirty years younger. June felt odd but mostly okay about the gaggle behind them, but Ward’s grampa muttered and moaned about them, and Ward himself kept his eyes forward and his fingers clenched a tad too tightly about her hand.

Ward’s none too social.

I guess not, she thought back.

Up ahead, in the post office parking lot, a woman and her son were headbobbing out of their car. Its dust-green finish clicked other clues into place: Calvin DeSario and his mother from across the street. She carried a package. Her deep-pitted eyes found them first, but Calvin’s swung over an instant later and the cloud-dappled, sun-scudding wave of emotions that washed across his face was a wonder to behold.

*****

“Jesus fuck,” he swore, the blasphemy like a distant air-brake in his mouth. There was Ward with his frigging grampa and June Lockridge. He’d calmed down the previous night, when hours had passed and no cops had swarmed in to arrest him and Mike. The phone had sent him into a frenzy once, but that had only been some guy trying to sell shit. Now here was the kid he’d tricked, barely a day later, and he knew Ward must have gone bawling to his grampa and his mommy doctor, knew too that that meant he was moments away from a dunking in deep shit. Just his luck. Mom mailing some gift to her sister in Arizona, Mike glaring knives at him, not convinced that he’d had nothing to do with Ward’s escape—the perfect time to say, Yeah, Mom, I’ll go to the post office with you. And now this!

But then his eyes connected with Ward’s.

And he saw the air about Ward assume color and shape, gently correcting his vision. It was Ward as he’d always been—not cut off from this air, this figure, but bleeding into it, a continuum, two and yet one. The clubhouse oak aromas of long ago teased his nostrils, the lantern light, the vivid talk of invisible companions drawing him closer to Len Frome and the others—and he wanted to weep for the loss of those days. But his eyes darted to the others, to June and Ward’s grampa and the amazing creatures enfolding and expressing them, to the cluster of people behind them. And his mother cried out, unhindered joy he’d never heard before in her voice, but before he could turn his head to look at her, it happened to him.

It was as though the accumulation of scum and sorrow in his life, pains inflicted upon him and by him, rose to the surface and lifted off him like a leaden cloak. Dots of elusive light danced like diminished gnats between him and his reflection in the Ford’s rolled-up window, bubbled iridescences pixilating the air and pinging silently away before his eyes could fix on them.

“Hello, Mrs. DeSario. Hi, Calvin,” said Ward, free of rancor. His companion nodded as they passed, the look in his vibrant eyes a kiss upon Calvin’s soul.

“Come, Cal,” his mother said. He followed her, the mist of nearly visible ginger-ale bubbles enlivening the air between them. The click of her heels on the blacktop sounded an odd counterpoint to the lightness in his head, the lightness of all he sensed. Around the tinted curls that broke below her dress collar, the faintest hint of a pair of hands delicately played. Not in the least out of place, they reminded him of sculpted marble Jesus or Mary hands, but animate and more beautiful than human artistry could have devised.

In the post office, an old guy, balding, in a checked shirt, was bent to the opened flip-face of his post office box, but he seemed stuck there, one hand on the thin stack of mail obtruding from the box, his face turned and frozen toward the incoming parade. Calvin saw a spirit rise out of the hunched figure—like ghosts out of corpses in hokey movies—and rest its bent arms across his upper back, its head similarly turned and rested on its hands just beneath the old guy’s wisped white hair. It defied gravity as he straightened up, his eyes blooming from slits to saucers. He too fell in behind Calvin, who followed his mother into the glassed-in area where two postal clerks perked up for the sudden influx of patrons.

Through the coy effervescence of his guardian, Calvin saw clear annoyance on Ward’s grampa’s face. An imposing man ordinarily, what with his trim white beard and muscled girth, he was dwarfed by his companion, and yet his words carried weight: “All right. Now everybody just back off and go about your affairs. There’s no call for you folks to bother us. You’ve all got it in you to handle what’s happening to you.”

“Ted, you old scoundrel.” A voice from behind turned Calvin’s head. The old guy with the shirt, not angered or upset, but not pleased either. “I don’t know how you and those two kids did this, but I want this thing off my back right now.”

“None of our doing, Ray. Sorry.” Ward and June were standing on either side of him, their eyes shifting to the dozen or so people in the post office and to their strange airborne companions. “We’re here to see Mindy Rutherford and pick up the mail. What you do about your friend there is up to you, but getting acquainted might be a good first step.”

The old guy stomped off, mail in hand, storming out of the post office as the pretty woman with the wrinkles and the bright lips and the big boobs came in carrying an empty white mail-tub. Out the window, the old guy climbed into his truck; his guardian, but not his scowl, had faded away. “Someone mention my name?” she said. She faltered at how odd everyone looked, her smile dimming. Then about the time her eyes went to Mister Jameson, her face basked again in inner light at her happiness in seeing him, then shifted upward by a smooth jolt of lumens—the flare of a bulb before burnout but without its gray-cotton death—as her guardian manifested. It was a creature of light and of flesh at the same time, boldly naked, more young than old (but how inadequate those terms were), not eliciting lust, despite her sensuality, but inviting Calvin’s love—and, it seemed, the love of others as well—in ways that ached and thrilled. The soundless ping and sparkle of his guardian accelerated so that Calvin imagined he could hear the ghost of a whisper coming from her.

“Ted, what . . . oh God, I’m going off the deep end.” She put an old-lady hand to her mouth, bright-red nails at her cheeks and nose. A laugh escaped her.

“She’s beautiful, Mindy. You too.”

“But you’re all . . . you can see her?”

“Yes.” Others concurred. The sculpted hands seemed to caress his mom’s neck as her voice joined in. Mister Jameson continued: “Mindy, you have the time to help me with the mail?”

“Oh I don’t know,” she said real fast, “I mean here’s this, I can’t believe, oh you mean there’s a new book—!”

“In three days, I’ll be bringing it in.”

“That’s super!” She seemed suddenly self-conscious, looking about at everyone watching her.

Mister Jameson’s eyes wandered to the people standing near Calvin’s mother. His companion put her huge head to his ear and moved her lips, but Calvin could hear nothing of what she said. Mister Jameson frowned. “Not meaning to be rude, but don’t you folks have anything better to do with your time than gawk at us?”

Half the crowd left then, dazed and reluctant, and a few of those pressed up against the window after they went outside. Some fell back, pretending post office business, to the high table with the pigeonholed forms, as the lady came out from behind the counter and gave Mister Jameson a squish-breasted hug. When his mother tugged him with her to the unsmiling clerk, he was smiling so much that Calvin almost doubted it was him. But then Ward and the others disappeared to retrieve the mail from the outer room, and the clerk got his unsmile back, and the hands faded at his mother’s neck, and the scintillate that held him in thrall went flat as month-old root beer. And Calvin felt both a pull toward the next room and a hazy resentment at having tasted and then lost what Ward and June and Ward’s grampa had given him.

*****

Pesky folks. Almost as stifling as fame in his worst imaginings, tinseltown adulation. The well-intended flies he’d shooed away at the post office swarmed again, most of them, on their way down Main to the ice cream parlor. He almost called it off right then, but once he put something on his agenda, it took a natural disaster to knock it off, and that rule held even more so when it came to the rituals he went through in finishing and sending off a manuscript.

So ice cream it was.

He sank his spoon into the hot-fudge obscenity placed before him on the hot-pink table. Gregerson made the best buttermilk-based ice cream on the planet, and it was T. E. Jameson’s great fortune that one of his most appreciative readers owned and operated this parlor and kept always in good supply his favorite author’s favorite flavor, Pumpkin Nutmeg Marshmallow Supreme. Shave an hour or two off his life for the cool taste of leaf-skittering October heaven in his mouth: it was a tradeoff worth making.

The stuffed backpack leaned against his right leg, a pressure to insure against theft and forgetfulness. Ward on his right and June across from him were spooning into their frosted, whipped-creamed, deliberately overspilled glass towers of pink and brown and white. The staff was much more sprightly than usual, imps in varying stages of visibility drawing forth genuine delight in serving those in the shop, and honest smiles replacing the manufactured ones some of them ordinarily felt obliged to wear.

“Look,” said June, “there’s Mindy.” She pointed past the crowd of onlookers, most of them seated at tables with uneaten ice cream melting in front of them as they craned and pretended not to stare at him and the children, a few propped against the iron railings near the door, refusing to be seated when asked. Mindy Rutherford was pushing her way through these last. He signaled her over, her naked guardian glowing stronger as she approached.

“You guys sure are popular today.”

“Really?” he said. “We hadn’t noticed. Here, take a seat.”

“Okay. Hello again, you two. I was on break, headed for the drugstore when I saw the crowd gathered outside of Gregerson’s. I had a hunch it was you. Oh, June, I just love your—what do you call them? companions?—she’s so, I don’t know, like some baked-bread-smelling grandma. Makes me wish she could hug me forever. And Ward, yours is so colorful and zippy and changeable.”

“Yeah, that’s Timothy.”

She asked, “Everything okay with you?”

“Ward’s just a little turned off by all the attention I think,” June said.

Grampa took in Mindy as she talked to the kids. What a fine woman she was. Her guardian brought out a sensual side that had always been muted before, muted not because she had suppressed it but because there were so many other worthy qualities that came together in her. She deserved the best life had to offer, and he hoped, knowing nothing of her history, that her goodness was being repaid in the coin she deserved. “I don’t blame Ward one bit,” he said. “We seem to act as a kind of catalyst; but I never asked, and neither have Ward and June, to play any such role in people’s lives.”

“Ted, you’ve got it all wrong.” She touched his arm. Her companion’s face, spirit and sex blent, hovered there to reinforce her message whenever he looked away. “You’ve been given a great gift. People grow up, they lose touch with who they are—things they knew by instinct when they were young, and I mean really young. I saw other people’s guardians fade when you left, and I saw and felt mine dim but she didn’t go away. She’s always been with me, but knowing her and seeing her has given me, I don’t know, a new dimension, the ability to be the chess piece like I always have been, but to also be the hand that moves the chess piece and to almost touch the mind behind the hand. The three of you have a chance to do that for everyone, to change people’s lives for the better.”

She’s right, Ted.

“Cool it, Esme. Did you hear her?”

“No.”

“She’s agreeing with you. But I’m not interested in that at all. I simply want to write my books and live my life in peace and quiet. I’m no Gandhi. Never wanted to be, never intend to be in the future. Real people are too hard to deal with. Look at them, how out of control they are; I much prefer my good book folks, just complex enough for my purposes. If they get too unruly, me or Esme here, we axe them and hire some other character willing to stick to the script.”

A waitress came by, and Mindy refused Ted’s offer of ice cream, preferring Perrier. He insisted it go on his tab. A little girl holding a smiley-faced balloon, which upon further inspection proved to be a guardian, wandered over to suck her thumb and stare at them until her wonder-struck mother, the faintest outlines etching the air about her, led the little girl away.

Mindy’d made her case and wasn’t one to press it, so the conversation turned next to her excitement about the new book. Almost made him forget the gawkers: to watch the beauty lighting her face and the concentrated hint of her in her guardian as he skated lightly over the premise of Thalia. But near the end of his recitation, he caught a glimpse of Ward hunched over his ice cream looking real spooked and June, concerned, by his side. “It’s getting a little close in here,” he offered. “Why don’t we try the town square, find some breathing space?”

The sea of onlookers parted for them, but where it closed up behind them, he could see that they were about to take on a larger train than before. At the door, he turned and, from what Esme said, was nastier than he had to be. Felt like the sheriff of Tombstone: Go on about your business or I’ll arrest the whole pack of you, that sort of tone. But it turned the trick, particularly when, after enough whiners pleaded for it, he promised that he at least would return the next day, knowing as he said it that it was grade-A bullshit, that they’d have to storm his treehouse if they wanted a hope in hell of seeing him again before Thursday’s delivery of the manuscript.

The town square was two short blocks away. The four of them walked briskly enough to pretty much leave a wake of stunned citizens behind, magnetizing only a few of the more needy souls. Ward huddled close to him and June had an arm around Mindy’s waist. When they hit the square and started in on the diagonal, headed toward the gazebo-like band shell, he pointed out the crowd circled about nearby, making a joke about some competing medicine man hawking a cure-all in a dark bottle, better than guardians and only one thin dollar. But the closer they drew, the clearer it was that there was a fight going on.

Gotta stop it, Ted.

Great, he thought. The idyllic town of Auroville—a peaceful haven for lovers of the way things used to be way back when—now hosted two young toughs, summer dragging on a tad too long for them, bloodying one another in the town square while the citizenry looked on and did nothing. He started to shrug off the backpack so he could storm in and break it up, but they were close enough at that point that those on the periphery bloomed guardians, turned to locate the influence transforming them, and gave him just enough of an inroad to see that it was Tom Haskell, suit dirtied and disheveled, pummeling the crying face of his drunken father and screaming to take back what he’d said, take it back. The kids kept close to him, closer than might have been safe any other time. But now, guardians were filling the air to left and right, calming influences like flowers opening in time lapse toward the sun as they walked into the center of things, and father and son battling on the ground stopped, and looked, and wept at their own blood-filtered bloomings and what beauty shone from them.

*****

When they made it back home, Ward mumbled an “Excuse me” and shot off into the woods, Timothy tumbling through the air alongside him. Ward expected it hadn’t come as a great surprise. Timothy had, after all, been open in his soothings and the others had joined in, trying not to make too big a deal of it, while showing their concern. Still, Ward felt ashamed even as he bolted, knowing he’d have to apologize to Grampa and June later.

Weirded out? As Ward ran along paths discovered and reinforced in his years growing up, his companion thinned and slid about intricacies of leaf and bark passing by on either side. The foliage he thus honored might have been lying beneath clear glimmering water, except that nothing stirred under Timothy’s swift slipstream.

“Yeah, a little,” Ward said. “Okay, a lot. I like being alone. Just the family. And June. And you. Who do those. People think. They are?”

Slow down. Brisk walk’ll do you fine.

Ward slowed. Tears came then as he stumbled along, but he was far enough in not to worry about anyone seeing or hearing him. He wiped them on his short sleeves, arms raised like broken elephant trunks one after the other to get at them. An old crushed Kleenex came out of his back pants pocket and he blew his nose, wiping it. A favorite clearing rose up about him, pine needles dead and almond-brown and crunchy where he walked, streaks of sun painting the tall, sparsely-branched trees—a natural ellipse. The path he’d come in on had two counterparts off to his left and right, one heading unhurriedly back to the treehouse, the other skirting a creek and then climbing into rougher, more adventurous terrain. Skewed off-center was a small outcropping of rock, cold stone fitted to his bottom. He sat. His hands found the sun-glinted armrests, a shoot of greenish-gray jutting up from a fissure at his right hand, scepter in sapling stage, one thin leaf and the beginnings of another.

“They scare me, the way they look at us like we’ve got the answers. The whole thing scares me.” His thumb worked nervously against granite. Timothy’s body twisted like taffy just above the ground, long snakelike silently-ratcheting torso like dough being rolled out and stretched for pretzels; but as playful as these movements were, his face opened and deepened before Ward, genuinely attentive and concerned.

Not up to it?

“I don’t know what you mean.”

You know.

“If you say so. I’m not sure about that.” Timothy was missing the point. “The point is, it’s all changing too fast. I just want my home and my mom and my grampa and Joydrop and June and good old eighth grade in a few weeks, that’s all. Is that asking so much?”

Not enough.

Ward struck rock with his palm, a stinging numbing blow. “What do you expect?” Before Timothy could reply, he veered off on a new tack. “Why can’t you go back to what you were? You used to be my best friend, funny and jokey. But now that June can see you, and Grampa, not to mention half the town—it’s like you’re leaving me, like you’re sunk deep in me but somehow part of them too.”

Not what-I-expect, the voice soothed. What-you’re-capable-of. Timothy’s ropy body suddenly collapsed in at the spine, fanning left and right like water unrestrained by a burst of surface tension. Ward watched as he swept two ways about the clearing, meeting behind Ward’s back. He saturated the ground with his grace, rippling out past the trees in a thin but sturdy wash of light. His head, bobbing upon an attenuated stalk to Ward’s right, should have been laughable but wasn’t.

“Cute, real cute.”

Hold your water.

Before he could ask what that might mean, Ward felt suddenly as if he were back in the fake ocean with his mom at Water World, but instead of the warning whistle and the gradual swell of artificial waves as the still water began to lap at their inner tubes, Ward’s craggy throne rode the crest of an unexpected wave straight up, smooth yet sudden enough to drop the pit of his stomach into his groin. The needled floor hillocked upward like some great fur-backed beast roused from sleep. The trees defining the clearing and those ranked behind rode the groundswell, pointing to the heavens still, not collapsing under geologic seizure, but standing tall, riding out at stepped levels below him the mountainizing of the plane. All boats rise, came the phrase. Instead of the earth-groan of rock and root under massive strain, the sounds that scoured his ears were more like massive leaf-rustle or the sway of unharvested wheat.

The forest terrain telescoped below him, at once as he knew it and transformed. There was his house, so tiny it was as if he were looking at it from a balloon; there were Grampa and June in the backyard near the treehouse, sharp miniatures moving over the green grass; through the roof he saw his mother back now from the hospital, and his gramma being fed by Joydrop, and they were so small and so precious and so distant he ached for the love of them and feared for their loss.

No loss. You’re okay.

And that was true. “What are you doing?”

Time enough. Timothy’s disembodied head gestured everywhichway-ward at once, a subtle impossibility pulled off with ease. Ward gasped at how quickly Auroville came under his purview, its valley setting unmoved yet uprising as building after building backlit the scrim of brick and board that usually, but now no longer, hid the scurryings of those inside. Ward’s vision of the earth and the earth itself rippled swiftly outward like stone in pond: on his left, the forest lands leading up to Lake Tahoe and Carson City and the Nevada deserts beyond; on his right the gray tape of I-50 pulling up little towns whose names he didn’t know, and Sacramento knotted in a crisscross of highways, and swiftly the land between it and San Francisco, and by God the blue-white sheen of the ocean beyond. Chittering humanity spilled into him—not invasive but welcomed—as the great earth unglobed itself, the horizon unbending at the rush of Hawaii and the Philippines and Japan and then the overwhelming landmass of Asia. Ward’s mind felt full of light. The world had become a visible plane, exposing itself to his amazed unblinking stare. Not power had he been granted, so much as privilege. He was still the same thirteen-year-old boy, rough granite under his hands, the ordeal he’d endured downtown still nagging at him; but he no longer had to turn his head to fix on new directions, but encompassed the elaborate writhe of humankind in the distinctness of its multitudinous threads. It was almost as if, instead of the world coming to him, really he had been spread—as thin and sturdy as Timothy surf-slapping through the forest—about the planet or had tapped into a shell of ethereal benevolence encircling the globe.

Ward?

“Yes?”

Had Timothy spoken his name? Had he replied?

Here’s how things are. He’d been enmeshed in the beauty of the vision granted him, too caught up in wonder to notice particular patterns. Now it was as if Timothy had dropped a filter over his eyes, or removed one. Not real time either, this, but rapid-fire visions of cruelty unfolding out of the recent past and manifesting at that moment throughout the world, deaths and manglings in the name of noble or venal causes, the sufferings of victims, the grievings of family and friends, the brain warps and justifications of perpetrators acting alone or in concert. He saw a man and a woman, faces ghastly normal, planting explosives in a subway station; the life-threads of twenty luckless people being drawn to one moment and then cut in the noise and meat-mangle of detonation; its tremor heard in the locked bodies of the young couple who had done it, her with her eyes on the clock and her legs tight around him in the hotel bed as she frantically clutched handfuls of tufted hair, him feeling drenched in shit and blood at the dull broomph, his enthusiasm having steadily dwindled as the plan had gone forward, until now he felt trapped in and forever tied to the monstrous woman beneath him. And he saw men in silk suits whose beefy nods and ruby-studded fingers set in motion a dance of acts that flared outward through the world, rippling here and there ceaselessly, an exchange of money, a theft, a mugging, the sinking of thin steel beneath marked skin upon millions of arms, the rush of violent pleasure, and sometimes more, into their veins. He saw armies shouting words he could not understand pour righteously into places that hated them, rip clothes from caught women, unlimb their babies before their eyes, hold the weeping women down and force their penises into them, and hack their heads from their shoulders for refusing to disgorge secrets they didn’t know. Ward was staggered by the sheer weight of scheming and hatred that echoed and re-echoed throughout the world, distilled thereafter into print and broadcast, endless biffs and boffs and brawls bleeding onto front pages and spewing from talking heads on the tube. Worse, each vision delved sufficiently deep into the lives of those involved, that easy condemnation of this or that faction proved impossible.

“Stop it, Timothy, please,” Ward pleaded. “Shut it out. I can’t look at it any more.”

And here’s how things might be. His guardian’s words were as balm to his soul, zinging out across the world in a shuttered eyelid’s blink precisely along that shell of ethereal benevolence Ward had only thought he’d imagined before. As one, the planet’s billions paused, looked up, bloomed everywhere a colorful wash of guardianship. The first tentative steps into faith breezed by in time-lapse until Ward saw, without exception, the full engagement of earth’s populace in the strengthened companions by their sides and the falling away of tried-and-false patterns of behavior in favor of new ones. He saw the will rise, saw it in the dance of the guardianship, and watched that will translate itself into action—to revere all religions and to love them for the beauteous contraptions they were, but not to kill or die for them; to bend every human effort to control the size of the planet’s population and to provide for every stork-delivered baby dropped into this world; to bring new modes of being to outmoded nations, that each of them willingly—and as one, racked with fever and ranting, rises at last to the pure sun-washed sweat of health—beat their bellicosity into appropriately submissive service to the greater good. But as wondrous as these sights were to Ward’s madly enhanced eyes, it wasn’t the change in macro-behavior that touched his heart so much as the individual shifts that gave rise to it. The crusty old senator from New England who realized how ineptly comical he’d become, found the wisest woman in his state, threw his support to her, and saw her seated in what was swiftly becoming what the Senate had always proclaimed itself to be, but hadn’t been for generations, an august body worthy of reverence and respect; the abusive husband and his submissive wife, who together cast off their shells of sickness and found beneath all the pain a love that took, and grew, and made an interwovenness firm enough to depend on, but flexible enough to thrive on, an inspiration to those who hitherto had felt nothing but upset and rancor over what they had seen and heard of the couple’s doings; the lesbian lover who renounced all jealousy, indeed encouraged her mate to explore and enjoy anything and everything, however beyond the pale it might appear, that made her happy, who in fact persuaded whole nations in her book No Possessions that no good ever came of stifling the guardian-inspired urges of a loved one; the military man who, in an effort to save a crumbling empire, brought his world counterparts together in their blinding uniforms, all different, and discovered by the time the weekend was over that these brothers were soulmates, that weapons indeed were superfluous, that all he and they really needed was an annual weekend together to boast over past glories, to mock-wrestle naked in mud, and later to wander off in twos and threes to explore deep delights they’d scorned in a previous life but found they loved in this one—all these and millions more, interwoven yet distinct to his heightened vision, did Ward thrill to, the individual and net effect of the embrace of beings who had too long been invisible, but who had once, before the beginning of memory, guided humankind about the earth. It was with dismay, but a dismay that dimmed but slightly the hum and buzz of his brain, that Ward watched the reversal of Timothy’s magic then, the planet once again enwrapped over curved horizons, the returning opacity of roofs and minds, the slow silent hydraulic collapse of the landscape about him and beneath him, and the regather of Timothy’s body, unsurfing, unfanning, unsnaking, until he was once more hovering in his more-or-less usual state.

Turning to Timothy, Ward tried to speak but found he couldn’t. The rock beneath was making his buttock bones ache, so he shifted about, leaning more weight now on the right than the left.

Really truly possible.

“I, um . . . I don’t know whether to shout for joy or throw a fit.”

Do neither.

“Yeah, okay.” He rose, woozy on his feet. Too much oxygen to the brain maybe, forest rich with wind, sunshine falling like gold pieces through the trees. “Well I guess I’ll go find the others. Timothy?”

What?

“Am I still thirteen?”

Sure.

Ward shook his head. “Part of me sure doesn’t feel thirteen any more.”

Still miss the old ways?

“You bet I do. But I guess it seems, I don’t know, kind of childish. I have a feeling June and Grampa don’t have a big problem with my running off like that. I also have a feeling the three of us have some serious things to discuss this afternoon.” He headed for the path that led back to the treehouse, needles snapping as he walked.

Timothy swirled like lightning about the perimeter of the clearing, curved bands of color behind a spermiculate head. Leaven with levity, he said, skidding to a cartoon halt beside Ward, bunching folds of air like endless rug. And remember, their guardians need time to grow. Not as strong as yours.

The more he thought about it, passing squirrels with claws frozen in tree bark, the more sense that made. June had lost Jeannie for years, had (in those early days) only a strong belief in her, but no sight or sound until today. Grampa had enjoyed Esme for many years but only as a muse, a constricted if worthy view of her. Would one or both of them revert? Would June’s parents, when they got wind of what had happened today, let her return tomorrow, or ever? And was he perhaps as mad as his grampa, totally over the edge at this point, all delusion and nothing in his future but straitjackets and electroshock?

Nuts to that. Timothy had split and was filtering himself through brambles and bushes to either side along the path. Patches of long, soft, beaten-down grass mixed with dry brown creases where he walked.

“Very funny.”

Halfway back, he sensed the goodness coming toward him before he heard or saw anything. Then a glimmer of Jeannie bubbled up like a brief burst of daydream ahead, then vanished, advance guard, and he knew that June at least was not far behind. When he rounded a bend and saw her coming toward him, sandals and shorts and shirt and beautiful, wide-open face, its echo in Jeannie above and about her, he wanted to cry at how perfect she was.

She ran to him, slowing as she neared. “Are you—?”

“Yes,” Ward said. “Everything’s fine.” He drew her close, hugged her, felt the long warmth of her against his body, smelled and kissed the delicious aroma of her neck. Her arms tightened around him and he squeezed the air from her, then eased up. His right hand glided over her back, her waist, her buttocks, found the warm downy skin of her left thigh, feeling how good she felt.

“We were worried about you.” Her voice softened at his ear, kissed his lobe.

“Me too.” Ward kissed her cheek, her lips, long and lingering, then he hugged her again. “But there’s no need for worry anymore.” In the air, Jeannie was meshing with Timothy again, sunlight playing amazing games with their malleable spirit-flesh. “You still have those condoms?”

He felt her smile against his cheek, the to-and-fro circular nod brushing her face against his. Ward backed off just enough to get a hand on her hip pack zipper and ease it slowly open.

*****

Carver Haskell’s life had shifted from nightmare to dream all in an instant.

First there’d been the bruising hell of Tom’s fists pummeling his face, the liquor bottle a dull bone digging into his thigh where his son’s leg had trapped it. Then, through a crowd of faceless fascinated used-to-knows had walked the miracle, angels ballooning everywhere and that novelist with an Amazon towering over him and the two kids with their odd angels and Mindy Rutherford, lovely Mindy—though he’d never realized how lovely before—with hers. Tom, backlit in sunlight, had flared out an angel of his own, and even as he marveled at how like distant memories of baby Tom it seemed, the faint gold gleam at the far end of his dark tunnel hurtled forward and through him and out into the air, sweet metallic vomitus of his soul with the eyes of a heartful android, a Metropolis robot-lady though he’d never seen that movie, only stills. Now here he lay, sloshing in Mindy’s bathtub, not a stitch on, while she, kneeling on a throw rug with her sleeves rolled up, soaped his body, her fingers now on his penis but not an ounce of sensuality in the act, just this distant benevolence as if she were bestowing her kindness on someone else and it was his privilege merely to witness it.

“No need to thank me,” she said, but the way she said it made him notice he’d been droning “thank you thank you” for God knows how long. He willed himself to stop and the phrase trickled to a halt. Up where the tiles misted from the water’s warmth, his golden lady lazed, still full-size but see-through and no longer audible like she’d been when the writer fellow had been by. He started to ask if Mindy could see her, but then he remembered already asking that. She couldn’t, not anymore, just like he couldn’t see hers, though Mindy insisted she was there next to her.

“Carver, you sure got yourself in some state,” Mindy said, like a mom for a moment but he didn’t mind. A wavy strand of hair fell in her face but she whipped it up and back with a toss of her head.

“State o’ California,” he said, reading the angel’s lips, and Mindy smiled and kept on soaping him, his legs and feet whipped white with suds. She’d rushed past the writer guy in the town square, helping Carver up off the hard cement, and walking him away, off in the direction she’d come from, a blank expression covering Tom’s face when he glanced back. It was almost as if Mindy’d been appointed to look after him, where before, she’d just been one more motif in the Auroville tapestry, nice but nothing special. She felt under his ribs and found the washcloth, dipping it wet with flat slaps at the water, wiping away the suds from his lower body as she’d done his upper.

“All right,” she announced. “Let’s dry you off and see about that face.”

He got unsteadily to his feet, accepting her help but trying not to drip on her clothes. His hands dampened her shoulders as she toweled him partway dry in the tub, dark gray stains on light gray cotton. Then he stepped out, a slip at his back foot but she took his weight full on her chest and steadied him. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, but she assured him, buffed him dry, and cinched the towel around his waist. His golden angel followed like an afterimage, an oddly colored Abraham Lincoln stared at too long in a book of optical illusions; she mouthed imperceptibly and often, but he’d stopped trying to figure out her words.

Mindy guided him to the mirror. The razor and the shaving cream she’d purchased on the way home sat there on the counter to the left of the sink. She took a hand towel from the rack and made high-pitched swipes at the mirror, but it steamed over again as soon as it was clear. “Trust me,” she said, giving it up and turning to him. “I’ll go around the cuts and we’ll patch them up later, but you let me know if I’m too rough on the bruises.” She cupped one hand and whipped-creamed a swelling dollop of meringue on her palm. Soft lime scent filled the air as she patted it on his face, warm, then cooling like a thin blanket barely covering his jawbone.

“Why’r’you doing this?” It escaped rueful, his mouth muscles tight to keep from being cut. The scraping of the safety razor was unbearably loud; the shavings washed down the drain like dead ants.

“Don’t talk.” Her eyes were intent on her work. “It feels right, I guess. But if someone asked me flat out if it makes any sense I’d have to say no. I like my privacy. Never took care of anyone but myself.”

“Ralph?” Mindy’s husband, fat man in an open casket, came to mind, an indecency of silence; he’d always turned a bright animated face, lively with quips, to the world.

“No, Ralph was his own man, self-sufficient, lived in his own little world. Cooked his own food, washed his own laundry, and left me this house fully paid for, thanks to the policy you sold him.”

“Payback.” His tone was flat.

“Nope, nothing like that. I was as bad as the rest of the town, not about to get involved. But then she came along and I couldn’t argue with what she said.”

Weakly he offered, “I don’t need anybody’s help.”

“Oh yes you do.” She wrung out a warm washcloth and wiped away the rest of the shaving cream. “Let’s not have any lies here. I’m going to dry you out, however long it takes, and then you’ll be on your way.”

His golden girl nodded. Her face should have daunted him, but it drew him. She was barely visible, a tarnished smudge on the air. “They said they’d be back?”

“Yes, but I’ll call Ted Jameson tomorrow to make sure of it. I know I could use another dose of whatever it is they’ve got, and I’m pretty sure you could too.” She led him to the closet, rumbled back the mirrored door, reached for a lidded carton on the top shelf. Her shirt strained against her breasts, tugged diagonally from bosom to belt. “I donated most of his clothes, but I saved a few things.” Carrying it to the bed, she opened it up and pulled out a flannel shirt with the elbows out and a large pair of off-tan pants, a thin black belt still in the loops. “Tell me your size and while I’m gone you can wear these. Not the best of shape, but they’re clean and roomy.”

He mumbled some numbers and then, with her help, put them on. They were cold and musty but soon warmed to his skin, and even the mustiness was cozy because it belonged to Mindy’s house and she was this pretty, sort of goggle-eyed animal with warm hands that brushed his abused flesh as she dressed him. Her words wove webs of caring about him as he lay down barefoot on her bed, and then she was gone to buy him some clothes, but coming back soon, her assurances repeating themselves in the bedroom air beside his golden angel, now a fancied bruise or a visible sneeze of pollen above him. Mindy mixed in with the writer guy’s saying he’d be back but you could tell he really didn’t mean it, and Carver wondered if Mindy didn’t either. He wondered if he’d lie here emptied out, doomed to devolve into dust right here, watching the two of them loom over him, empty promises seeping out of their mouths, and he cried softly until enervation and exhaustion took him down into sleep.

6. Town Meeting

Mid-morning the next day, Laura Keeshan agreed to a detour on her way to the hospital. After a week’s rush of babies, she’d had a nice long respite, been able to spend dinnertime with her family, enjoy several leisurely hours of conversation with every last being in the room, commune for several hours with her guardian as she lay in bed, and then fall contentedly asleep in his enfolding arms, a deep and untroubled sleep from which she woke refreshed, Topsy, as she called him, hovering cross-legged, fat, and smiling above her down comforter.

“How many are there, Mom?” Ward asked from where he lay on the back seat next to her father, Mister Megabucks, grumbling like an old codger and giggling like a six-year-old at the same time. It had been Dad’s idea to duck out of eye-shot, as he put it, until they had glided past the town square. Now it was clear he realized how silly that was and was playing it for all it was worth.

“Couple dozen at the core, clustered about the gazebo steps talking,” she said. “Same number scattered here and there, on benches, by the drinking fountain; there’s Mindy Rutherford with a considerably cleaned-up Carver Haskell. She must be using some of her sick leave.”

“Don’t know why I promised I’d come back. Fight was over. All these idiots—”

“Blooming idiots, Grampa,” cracked Ward.

“—yes, a goddamn pack of blooming blithering idiots standing around gawking at us like we were gods.”

“Grumble, grumble, grumble.” Topsy twinkled over the dash, no obstruction to her driving. He was a guardian of very few words, but that was fine with her. “You promised because they pleaded, and you saw that they were genuinely hurting, and so you did what any decent person would do.”

“Call me a misanthropic philanthrope.” Dad and Ward chuckled together, and she could hear Timothy and Esme say something in response, but without June and Jeannie by, it was too hard to make out exactly what.

“I sure hope this works,” said Ward.

“You told her to be near the front door?”

Ward said he had.

“I don’t see how they’ll be able to resist.” Laura turned onto Phillips Court, recalling with what reluctance the Lockridges had agreed to June’s staying for dinner the evening before, Joydrop driving her home at nine; and then this morning, they’d coolly refused to let June out of the house at all, not even bothering to invent an excuse.

She pulled boldly into their driveway right up to the garage door, her payback for being telephonically snubbed. Ward and Dad got out like a pair of bank robbers, Timothy rhythmically swaying side to side like saddlebags flanking a sauntering nag, Esme in easy stride behind them, running a fingertip along the roof gutter as though inspecting for dust. Topsy hid a giggle behind one hand and pointed with the other to the front window, where Anne Lockridge looked pale and drawn at the perceived assault on her house. The front door was pulled open, and there, feet firmly planted and a look of grim defiance on his face, was June’s father with his daughter peering out from behind him.

“Just what do you people think—?” he started, but by then, Ward and her father had reached the porch, and Laura could feel, as well as see, the redimensioning of Esme and Timothy and the way Jeannie billowed out of June to close the circle about George Lockridge, melt the grimness from his face, and release like a scattered host of herons the companion now unfettering from his head. Yeast-rise, the erasure of worry lines; and then his wife welcomed herself into the freshness, her guardian shimmying out of her body like an unexpected orgasm. Laura wanted to stay more than anything, but her appointments at the clinic began in half an hour and there were bound to be prenates close to being neonates who would need her help.

She said goodbye at the door, Topsy not dimming much as she left, thanks, she supposed, to her extended sojourn with Ward, June, her dad, and their companions the evening before; and perhaps to a special affinity—she being T. E. Jameson’s daughter after all—for what lay beyond the pale of everyday reality. She wondered what her colleagues at the clinic and the hospital would make of Topsy, if indeed they’d have the eyes to see him at all; but whether or not their faculties were up to the perceptive challenge, Laura had no doubt that Tuesday, August 24th and all the days to follow were going to be one hell of an interesting time in her professional life.

*****

It had come as a shock to Harold Porter, downtown for a browse through Lyle’s Used Books, to see the town square so full of people. It wasn’t lunch hour, couldn’t be more than eleven o’clock, yet here were folks with jobs milling about, jawing away like it was a weekend. Bedford Avenue seemed to have caught their attention, a good half of them goggling that way at any one time. He asked one of them—it was Lyle himself, out from behind his counter—if there was a parade about to start or something and Lyle launched into this wild tale about T. E. Jameson and these two kids breaking up a fight the day before and giving everybody in the town square what Lyle called “a religious experience” and then promising to return today. Then Lyle started to gesture into the air and introduce someone he admitted he could no longer see, his guardian angel he called her, and Harold suddenly wished that his wife, Her Honor the Mayor, were here now instead of in Sacramento hobnobbing with the governor. He was just about to cross over to City Hall to find out why none of Thea’s underlings had come out to see what was going on, when, striding along Main Street with a gaggle of citizens in their wake, the novelist himself and his two young charges appeared.

“Sorry, Lyle, I just don’t get it,” Harold began with a shake of his head. “What’s the big—?”

But Lyle rushed by, swept up in the crowd that surged past him to surround the threesome and lift them on their shoulders and carry them toward the gazebo. He could see T. E. Jameson angrily objecting to that and casting about to check that Ward and June were okay. Harold wondered if maybe he shouldn’t give his brother Joe a call down at the station; but then the crowd drew nearer, and Harold heard with new ears the slow sweep of cars easing by along Main and the high ripple of a songbird twittering in a tree and the tremulous joy lifting from those who approached—and a skin sloughed off him like sunlight evaporating a sheen of sweat, sloughed off and up and through him like hidden joy percolating outward yet staying within. It eased off him in wisps, cotton-candying, firming up. And through its eyes, through her eyes and his own, Harold witnessed the doubling of the crowd, the creatures close-clinging and sailing above them—but the strongest and sharpest were those of the three now lifted to the stage.

With her glance, she suggested him stageward. His feet wandered him closer but his mind was marveling at a new field of feeling. It was as if whole chunks of dead flesh had sprung suddenly to life in him, bits of himself that he’d forgotten about: once vibrant, now atrophied. Jameson was berating the crowd, ranting about privacy, as if he had been forced here against his will; but there was an underlying message of love cored beneath the volley of barbs and Harold found it hard to focus on the words, his angel so overwhelmed him with sensory overload. His heart pounded and his face throbbed. His hips swayed as though as invisible girdle, tied tight, had burst asunder. With a measure of surprise but no shame, he realized his penis was erect, the bulge showing as he walked; but the energy focused there was more sensual than sexual, and the sweet high flush of arousal radiated not at his groin alone but throughout his body.

A breeze flowed across Harold’s face as Ted Jameson broke off and the little girl came forward to speak. On that breeze, he fancied he could differentiate the aromas of individual people.

It’s true. She’d spoken, a still quiet voice but no mistake about it. Her face spoke volumes, words of love and beauty and assurance. It reminded him of his wife’s face somehow, dear Thea as she’d been—or as Harold had idealized her—at first meeting. This, she said, is how you used to be able to smell.

It wasn’t merely perfumes he took in, nor the residue of shampoos, nor places roll-ons had missed. It was the essential aroma of living anima, each body unique and in its own way intriguing. Lyle’s leathered cheeks came to him, the in-turned bookishness of the man, stiff feathers of hurt from war wounds turned to scar, the faint whiffs of Verna, his wife, where in life she had touched him so often and with such love. Mindy Rutherford, buxom wench in civvies today, wafted in like a confectionery treat on his next breath, her cheap makeup not hiding the womanly wonderfulness of her, flesh not sufficiently caressed for how beautiful she smelled and yet flesh that cared little about such things, so outgiving was she. Beside her, his face washed and shaved and turned like an ache toward the stage, Carver Haskell nostriled into Harold then, all the hurt and ravage he’d undergone, all the sickness still in him, and all the love he’d once had and now re-embraced in Mindy, the submerged affection he bore toward his son and daughter-in-law and toward their first offspring, soon to be born. As he drew closer to the stage, and as his angel grew stronger and more well defined, the aromas deepened, not an overload to his system but a rich articulation of the world entire, a map into the infinitude all about him and a means with each inhalation of revitalizing more and more of his sensual, hitherto-slumbering self.

“—and I don’t know why all this is happening,” the little girl was saying, “but I guess you’d have to call it a blessing, and we ought to be grateful for it. I know I am. Ward?” She was a pretty thing, this June Lockridge, a smell of freshness about her, a pert blossom of budding womanhood, boysmell—this boy—upon her body and inside it where Harold could sniff the onset of blood. June’s angel had her fingers folded above her waist like a maple-syrup momma with an apron, and her face beamed bright as a full moon as she watched over the girl.

The boy came forward, a shy little guy whose excited guardian was the most vivid of any of them, swirling like rainbow sherbet in the gazebo air. As impressive as Ted Jameson’s lofty angel was, as wholesome and apple-cheeked as June’s, this third guardian, whom Ward now introduced as Timothy, was most completely in sync with his charge. No wonder the poor boy had been such a misfit. It was clear, both from what he was saying and from the smells wafting in from him, that this pair had been a team from the very beginning. Ward Keeshan started slow, half his words a mumble or swallowed, but his angel dipped in to whisper things to him and soon he gained confidence and slowed down and spoke up, taking the crowd into his hands as though he were born to it, awkwardness and all.

Harold wished like hell Thea were here to see this. He took a deep breath, so deep and free his nostrils made surf sounds. Thea flashed in his mind’s eye, two glimpses of her: one, speaking in her deep-blue professional pants suit, padded shoulders, coiffed hair, finger stabbing the air to press her point; the other, spread out naked under him, a loving sprawl of once firm flesh, dimmed in their bedroom out of modesty and shame, her painted lips open and moaning as his fingers moistened her and ignited her below, her urgent hands pulling him atop her, helping him into her, clawing at his back as he answered her thrusts, deepening her orgasm with his own.

Soon enough.

“Not soon enough,” he said, but there was a smile on his face and he marveled at the simple wisdom of the boy addressing them from the gazebo and how grand and glorious a day this dull Tuesday was turning out to be.

*****

“—and it’s like my grandfather was saying,” he said, looking out on the rapt audience, their guardians varying in strength and substance. “It began with us and we seem to be a catalyst for a lot of you folks, but it’s nothing we’re doing anything to will, there’s no hypnosis, and I’d guess we’re as astonished by it as you are.” A good half of them he recognized from yesterday, but many had brought family and friends along today. Some of the grumpier tag-alongs pulled away and broke off at the edge of the crowd, reminding Ward of the DMV man from yesterday; what part of their guardians had formed lapsed back into oblivion. But a few passersby took their place, kids and moms, a Spanish teacher from school and her husband, a tourist veering off his guided walk through town.

“I’ve got to admit I didn’t feel very good about this yesterday.” Ward wondered if his piping voice carried far enough, but Timothy assured him on that point. Still, the scallop sweep of traffic at his back was a minor irritant. “But the most amazing thing happened in the forest when I got home.” He described the barest part of what he’d been shown, gesticulating excitedly to recreate his vision and talking far too fast, but it came back in all its vibrant splendor and Ward felt bound to share as much as he could with those listening so avidly. The gold glint of Mister Haskell’s guardian caught Ward’s eye where her left side melded like caramel swirl ice cream into the right side of an ivory-skinned angel, both hovering, like a protective overhang, above Mister Haskell and Mindy Rutherford. “So, as wonderful as I know we all feel inside, this just might be the beginning of something very wonderful indeed for the whole world. We’re not into leading anything, but we were talking earlier about how fascinating it’s going to be to watch how all of this unfolds—how it all ramifies, is I think the way my grandfather put it.”

There was some movement behind him, Grampa talking to June, and then June came forward. “He’s ready to go,” she whispered and Ward nodded. Calvin DeSario had just ridden up on his bike, straddling it on one of the blacktop paths into the square as his guardian rebloomed about him like a whirlwind of carbonation. Ward waved and Calvin, cautious but quickly less so, waved back. “We’ll be on our way now I guess. It’s about time—”

“Don’t leave, please!”

“No!”

“Stay with us!”

The spontaneous protest, not universal but rising from the core of listeners crowded close to the gazebo, caught him by surprise. He gawped at them, his arms at his sides like twitching wings. Timothy offered nothing useful in the way of advice.

Then Grampa stepped in. “That’s it for now—”

Again arose wails of dismay.

Ward said, “Well maybe some of you could—”

“No, Ward, I don’t think so—” Esme tried to break in, but Grampa waved her into silence, bringing his voice down to within Ward’s range only. “Tell them we’ll return once more tomorrow, but don’t go inviting them home, we’ll never see the end of them.”

“Just for a little while.”

“No.”

“We’ll keep them to the backyard.”

“Ward, trust me, they’ll survive without us.”

“You wouldn’t have to be involved.”

Jeannie said something to June, who stepped forward: “Ward’s right, it’ll just be me and him. You can stay in your treehouse if you like.”

Esme dropped Let it happen on Grampa’s head, almost a breeze through his white hair.

“Oh shut up,” he replied. “I’m going to regret this, but go ahead, make their day—and ruin mine!”

“Thanks, Mister Jameson,” said June, and Ward echoed her thanks.

“Call me Grampa,” he grumbled.

Ward announced they’d come back the next day for one last gazebo gathering, but that those who really felt it necessary could follow them home and spend the next many hours with him and June in the backyard, soft drinks and cookies on the house. Most of the crowd broke away then, their guardians dispersing as they did; but nearly twenty chose to follow behind, including the mayor’s husband and Ms. Rutherford with Carver Haskell staggering ecstatically beside her—and Calvin DeSario at the rear, part pumping, part walking his bike up the sometimes steep incline that was Bedford Avenue. June, arm in arm with Ward, gave him quick kisses and pointed out once a faint smile tightening the corners of Grampa’s downturned lips where he trudged, back turned and Esme’d, before them.

*****

It was much nicer, June thought, to address those who had followed them in Ward’s backyard rather than from the gazebo downtown. No traffic noise, cozier somehow, closer to human scale. And Ward’s hut behind them made a natural backstop for their voices. Joy had brought out old quilts and drop cloths, but most people seemed content to sit on the lawn, even those you’d never imagine doing so. Their companions, struggling for strength despite Mr. Jameson’s absenting himself above, inspired her with their fragile beauty. Calvin DeSario had propped his bike against the oak tree and, after going inside to call home and let his parents know where he was, he’d joined Len Frome near the corner of the hut where Ward leaned listening to her. He and Len had grown since the days of the Shy Friends Club, and grown apart, but it was good now to see them together again and to watch the rebirth of the invisible companions they’d talked so excitedly about years before.

She spoke of those days, and details came back as she spoke. How first it had been just her and Ward, the magic of the hut drawing them into each other’s confidence. How Angela Carr had overheard them on the playground and shyly wangled her way in, then blabbed like a fool to Len Frome. But they guessed then that something inside Angela—pretty likely her guardian—had chosen wisely because Len too was not afraid of trusting his imagination to put him in touch with deeper truths, and, for all his quiet shyness, had in fact one of the more flamboyant companions. Len smiled as she spoke, his guardian timid patches of color filming the air, then flickering out. “Soon after,” she said, “Angela moved away and Len and I did what I guess most of you did, even those of you with no memory of ever having known your guardians—which was to grow away from them, to surrender ourselves to what teachers and TV told us so convincingly was real. My mom was going through boxes in our garage a few months ago, and she opened one and lifted out an old green and blue dress I’d worn when I was in first grade. Seeing the rabbit-ear ties hanging down kind of pathetic and sad at its sides was enough to flood me with memories of those times: my first primer where the teacher’s huge stand-up copy had one different illustration, the time I wore that dress to read about the happy man and his dump-truck to the kindergarten kids, a special smile I caught Mrs. Lehrer giving me one day that made me feel huge and powerful for weeks after. I’d forgotten so much and all it took was one look at a dress that had been hidden for years. Jeannie here was like that dress. She’d been put away one day and the lid closed over her, not protesting, just accepting her fate. That was a loss—one I guess we all go through—but I never knew how great a loss it was until Jeannie appeared to me a few days ago.”

June’s throat constricted and she glanced once at her companion, close as a hug yet not crowding her, her smile so beautiful, her eyes so warm with love. She spoke then of visiting Ward’s grampa in the treehouse, the burgeoning of their guardians, the first trip downtown, the scene at her house that morning where her parents’ resistance gave way so beautifully before their angels, what speaking at the gazebo had been like, and how happy she was to witness the variety and growing strength of this crowd’s guardians on such a wonder-filled afternoon.

Then she listened as Ward spoke. Some townsfolk had straggled in around the corners of Ward’s house, and a few more did so now. Ward’s grandmother was, as usual, seated at her window, but it was impossible to tell whether their words carried that far, and whether they fell on deaf ears once they reached her. About this time, June felt—like a hot tear from a startled eye—the faintest trickle of warm liquid seeping from her body. Just a trace, she knew from past experience. But it was enough to prompt her, Jeannie nodding, to signal Ward that she’d be back as soon as she could and to fringe around the crowd toward the house and in through the sliding glass doors to the kitchen. She’d known her period was imminent, but her usual fatigue and pimple attack had not happened; no warning, though thank God she always carried a few pads in her hip pack.

Joy was watching from the kitchen window. There was a glisten in the air about her head, but little more, and she fingered the pouch about her neck.

“Why don’t you join us?” June asked.

“Duty calls.” A head movement toward the hallway and Ward’s gramma. “Besides I can hear everything from here. You spoke beautifully.”

June thanked her, catching a little of what Ward was saying as she passed through the kitchen. Apparently her leaving had washed out or vanished several companions, and most of the crowd could no longer see Timothy, but he kept to his narrative, urging faith upon those listening to him and assuring them that he could see their companions even though they couldn’t. She cursed nature’s timing, vowing as she entered the bathroom at the back of the house to be as speedy as she could. The toilet lid levered up so that it struck the tank, a short porcelain bunt, sticking there as though magnetized. Swiftly she unzipped her shorts and twin-thumbed them and her panties down past her knees. As she sat, she noticed with relief merely the barest blurred line of scarlet and rust on the light canary of her cotton briefs. Not enough to show through.

Your mother’s in awe of you.

Yeah, June thought, she envies how easy it is for me, no cramps or bloat or queasiness, only a hint of soreness, light seepage, no problems with lower back pain or having to get up every hour like her. Jeannie smiled and nodded. It didn’t change the bother of having to rummage about in her hip pack, peel back the wrappings, and adhere the pad to her underwear, but Jeannie’s calming presence relieved the last residue of anxiety she’d once felt about wadding toilet paper and holding it to her vulva and watching it redden, knowing with her mind that there was only so much and that it would, over a long four days, eventually stop, but still having that lingering irrational fear that no it would never stop and that she would weaken and die. None of that did she feel now, not with Jeannie here.

Through the window, open a crack, she could hear the faint sounds of Ward addressing the townsfolk. But then, as she pulled up her panties, feeling the soft bulkiness of the pad between her legs, and the toilet flush hissed up and away, a different voice broke in, angry, not loud so much as vicious. She yanked up her shorts, fastening the catch and zipping them as she went to the window.

It was Mike DeSario, Patti close behind. He strode up to Ward, gripping his arm and tugging him off-balance toward him. As a few men in the crowd rose to stop him, June saw his left arm shoot across Ward’s chest, yanking him back against him, Mike’s hand seizing Ward’s shoulder as if it were a softball. A knife, before she could see where it came from, shot into his right hand and shelved itself under Ward’s chin.

June froze for an instant then . . .

. . . go!

. . . tore out of the bathroom, didn’t flush, absurd flash of embarrassment, but all she could see as viciousness lit into the windows of the family room and kitchen was Ward’s smooth skin turtlenecked in freshets of red, and she knew she urgently needed to be there right away, no idea what could possibly be done to stop it, but sobbing past Joy on the concrete patio, her mind aswirl, and rushing down the green slope straight through the crowd, thinking she would not stop running until Big Mike DeSario’s switchblade drew away from Ward and drove up into her, an insane sacrifice, but she was ready to make it.

*****

DeSario had no idea, when his mom hung up the phone and announced what his stupid fuck of a brother had said, exactly what he was going to do to Ward Keeshan. He only knew it would hurt like a motherfucker, do lasting damage, and keep that pansy freak away from his family for good. He fully expected too, given the fucked-up nature of the world, that he’d probably do some jail time downtown; no biggie, that pig Porter barked at you some, a pudsucking deputy or two laid some limp-wristed fist into your face, left you bleeding and dredging for breath on the stenchy floor, went off shaking the sting out of their hands, but by morning it all blew over and you just had to damp down how you felt about them until they jabbered their preacher bullshit at you and let you go. Fucking shitworms weren’t going to grok what he was about to do to Keeshan, but then they hadn’t seen the state his mother and Cal had returned in from the post office the day before; besides which they had no concept—nobody did these days—of family, how deep the wounds went when your brother was fucked over, made to look as foolish as you knew the sucker was—but there were matters a family dealt with on its own turf, and there was public humiliation, and Ward Keeshan had crossed that line once too often.

He’d grabbed Patti, slung her behind him on his bike, and roared out of the driveway, hatred burning in his head like fumes in his Harley’s engine. His father had slapped some sense into Mom the night before, had to be done; he’d gripped the hard cable of the mattress edge as he listened in the dark, wishing Patti were there to hug him tight and fuck the brain-grief out of him, hating his dad even as he understood he had to do it, recalling Calvin’s sullen face keeping quiet as the fight flared up between their mom and dad minutes after they’d set foot in the house.

A few narrow scrapes through town and up Bedford, he had such difficulty keeping his mind on his driving, Patti clinging close and knowing better than to say anything but for the terror in her hands. Horn honks and a few hothead obscenities, but he just fingered the fuckheads and gunned his bike, and they were forgotten meat; no way they’d come close to displacing Keeshan in his fury. They zoomed past the turnoff, but DeSario shouldered the bike and booted it about in a tight arc on the empty highway, then parked the sucker just past the Grant house and dismounted, pocketing the keys and leading the way down the access road, no idea how far along the house was but figuring he’d recognize it when it came up, fucking treehouse in the backyard, crowds of cars from the duped townfolk just as dweebed out as his brother was, how tough could it be to spot? Patti trailed behind, begging him to wait up. It occurred to him then, as densely-packed trees clocked by in sync with his boots on the blacktop, that he hadn’t alerted his buddies, Russo and the rest, to meet him here; yeah but good old prankish mayhem on a Saturday night was one thing, and having your friends witness the public humiliation of your brother was quite another. Patti didn’t count. Bitch was practically fucking family as it was. But he’d be reamed to hell and back before he’d let Joey Russo or Greg Gormezano or that fuck Richie Feit, itching to oust him, or any of the rest see his brother zoned out before some wacko writer out of his tree and squeaky-clean June Lockridge from across the street and Ward “I-talk-with-the-angels” Keeshan.

“Please, Mikey, slow down.” Girl squeal, maddening.

“Shut your mouth.” He didn’t look back, nor did he break stride. The house came around the bend, not as many cars as he’d expected, but he could see the treehouse roof sailing by behind the house as he crossed in front of it. He diagonaled the driveway—nobody noticed them from the windows, garage door down and mud-smudged on one side—and headed around the house through the boot-muffling grass.

Keeshan was standing before his fey little clubhouse, going on like a high-piping preacher boy, lawned crowd of zombies drinking in the swill and there was Calvin’s bike propped against the tree. And then he saw Calvin, sitting beside Len Frome, his lips parted so you could see teeth. It set him off, idiot mouth, seal those fucking lips, you show the world a flat lipline or they’re gonna shove some mother-tit in there and make you suck, little brother. He swept the crowd but they were nothing, empty sacks of shit who weren’t about to get in his way. Then Keeshan saw him coming and shut his yap.

“Yeah, you better can that shit,” he said, pleased at how stunned the sucker looked. “And I’m here to make sure you can it for good. You’re not gonna pull no hypnosis on me or Patti here, no way.” A couple of jerkoffs he didn’t recognize rose to their feet, tough bastards looking like trouble, no glassy eyes, no puff-pastry acquiescence about them. He grabbed Keeshan to him, brought out and switched open his blade, found a stretch of neck. “Stay where you are. This is between me and preacher boy here.” He began to back up. “Him and me, we’re going into the woods for a nice long talk, and if anybody tries to stop us, Keeshan’s gonna bleed and bleed bad.” That stopped them, the wiry fucker with the overdeveloped pecs and the Navy-necked guy with the squinty eyes and the hands clenching and flexing by his sides.

Then he hesitated, his eye catching the girl hurtling down the lawn, her face a mask of panic. He tightened his grip on Keeshan. To his right, the stretch of protesting hemp and the twist of the ladder lifted his glance upward, crazy old fart unshouldering out of a hole carved in the platform, catching rungs with quick stabs of stark white tennis shoes. DeSario’s blood boiled. He made ready to yell a halt to these two, but they were pushing him way the fuck too far and he knew he would have to take a deep slice out of Keeshan, knew that they wouldn’t heed him, felt rage in his arm, the tightening of the muscles, they didn’t think he meant business, he’d show them he meant business, all the jizz-wipes who’d ever wronged him, and there’d been a passel of them, he’d show every fucking one of them what it meant to cross Mike DeSario.

“Mike, don’t!” Patti shouted, but no it wasn’t Patti, it was Calvin. And the girl was barreling down the lawn, slicing through the buttered crowd; and the white-haired old fool was trembling the shit out of the rope ladder on his quick descent. But something happened inside DeSario as he watched her face, her frantic face—the tension went out of his arm, the knife fell from his fingers and shuked into the ground, somehow her face coming closer held the concentrate of his life, the grief, the hollowed-out hole in his belly, and she seemed to float toward him now, her face opening up, transforming, a kindness relaxing over it and drifting outward, healing him, reaching back through his past and closing rude wounds inflicted before memory had formed to recall them. She split; they all did, those on the lawn; Keeshan too where DeSario’s arm embraced him, a paintbox of colors issuing from his chest and forming in the air, a face that smiled; and the old man paused now on the rope-ladder, one arm slung over the rungs to hold him there, a gargantuan female figure shimmering out of his back like a hooped bubble breaking free and floating in wavery ellipsoidal struggle through the air. And inside, DeSario felt as if all the sludge dropped to the ground, ballast fast fallen, making him light and giggly like a helium high. He shifted Ward about, tried to glare into his eyes, but instead he melted there, and he blubbered, but that was one hundred percent all right. And his new lightness bloomed between, beside, and about them, a steel god, stoic and calm, a warrior for whom the shedding of tears was more manly than the shedding of blood, and . . .

. . . hello, Michael

. . . he said, and hearing him scoured out the bad brains in Mike’s skull and replenished it with new. “He spoke to me.”

“Yes, I heard him,” said Ward, scooping in an armful of June, who gasped with relief at his shoulder.

His brother joined them. “Are you okay, Mike?”

It was Calvin, and yet he’d never seen this Calvin before. Beautiful brother, lines of torment dug there by his own rough mouth, skin-learned; and beside him, a fizz of goddess, like a water balloon shorn of its covering at the moment of bursting, but streaming out in steady shape. “My God, Calvin, please forgive me,” he said, hugging his brother tight, squeezing soft oofs out of him.

“It’s all right, Mike. We never knew.”

“Never had a frigging clue, did we?”

“Nope.” There were tears in the little twerp’s eyes. Beside him, Len Frome’s gaze had wandered to Patti. What Mike saw when he turned to her transformed the world anew.

Out from under, came a voice of liquid steel.

No fucking kidding, he thought. He couldn’t tell how much of what he saw belonged to the deep changes happening in him and how much fell to Patti. He only knew, and that straight down into the marrow of his soul, that he’d never ever seen anything so delicate, so soothing, in his life. A thing of gauzy wisps, the thin sexless creature at her shoulder bore a look of fragile intelligence, not bookish knowledge in those eyes but deeply lived experience, hosts of hurts transformed. Patti, looking past him at Len, now turned her eyes in his direction, and he saw, by contrast with the lightness of her look now, how weighted down she had been before. He saw how plain her face was beneath a mask of cosmetics, and how beautiful that plainness was.

“Mikey,” she said, “you look so . . . like I’ve never seen you before . . . like a wound exposed and healed and turned into something so . . . well ‘regal’ comes to mind. And that silvery guy, he’s so, so—”

“Yes, he is.” He turned to Keeshan, no guardedness springing up but an open honesty he hadn’t felt in years. “Listen, I’m sorry, you understand what I’m saying, I was . . .”

. . . warped

“. . . yeah, what he said, warped, twisted up inside, and that’s still in there but it’s been vacated, one of them whatchamacallit things, cocoons I guess, and the moth has flown out.” His guardian’s guiding hand was-and-was-not on the back of his scalp, firm, gentle, loving. His skin reminded Mike of conquistador armor.

“It’s okay now, Mike, really.” Ward was smiling out from where June’s hair draped the side of his face, a hug that revolved them slightly one way, then the other, like pendular clockwork. He held out his right hand, his girl moving to his left, and Mike took it. Then he introduced Mike to his grandfather—and that was an awesome thing, a god crammed into human confinement but without airs, and no rancor about the violence Mike had threatened moments before.

And Mike and Patti stayed to hear Ward speak further, and then June and Mister Jameson. When the crowd finally dispersed late into the afternoon, Mike held back like a parched man at an oasis, met Ward’s mother, met Joydrop the live-in nurse and assistant, was invited with Patti to stay for dinner and at once accepted, his vivid guardian growing stronger and more firmly rooted the longer Mike stayed in the family’s presence. When he flicked on his Harley’s headlight and zoomed off with Patti in tow, his silver man hardly dimmed at all at the distancing, though Patti’s gauzy guardian grew wispier. And the scene that unfolded in the DeSario household that night, after he’d dropped Patti home, neither of them into so much as a kiss but contenting themselves with a simple hug, proved to be the most harrowing, most violent scene he could remember his family’s ever having endured.

*****

Through the beauty of that day, Carver Haskell had had premonitions. He’d only nibbled at breakfast, taken some fruit from the bowl passed around by Joydrop in the backyard, but Mindy’d had to finish most of it. Despite the flat contented plain of calm he persisted on and the joy he took in the further engoldening of his angel, he felt how thoroughly weakened his system was and knew the inevitable next phase he’d have to pass through, despite his delusory hope that angel-reacquaintance would somehow exempt him. On the way home, Mindy, with her arm around his waist, helped him negotiate the shoulder of Bedford, the deepening shadows beginning to shift, more motion in the foliage than wind or passing cars could account for.

Carver tried to keep the magical afternoon in T. E. Jameson’s backyard before his mind’s eye, the melding of his and Mindy’s angels as she sat beside him, the warmth of her hand on his knee. But the rat tails, slicked back with twists of slime, rolled and flicked inside the bushes like sodden braids of hair tugged out of a clogged drain—in his face, then gone. When they came to buildings, when he tried to fix on the cracked concrete facing of the walk across I-50, every unsmooth surface gave coloration and an unsettled roil to them, gave snouts and eyes, restlessness unceasing. “Are you all right?” Mindy asked him, but all he could do was shake his head and hold the seething rats at bay with denial, taking comfort in the calming vision of his angel’s anchoring gaze and the pure concern lifting off the loving woman by his side.

Downtown Auroville, under its skin of deepening dusk, hid whole nests of them. The glass of every storefront on Main sported copper-tinged reflections, glassine weaves of vermin camouflaged as glories of a dying sun. Rat fur ran beneath every surface, scurrying hard and tight about them on all sides, propagating even as he watched, one mortared body splitting in two and slipping away through brick like submerged moles tunneling the earth. It was all he could do, as the clicking of their claws rose from a whisper to a rustle, to keep from swatting them away. But the smooth untroubled gleam of his guardian’s skin and the sustaining benevolence in her face—denying the reality of the rats even as she affirmed her love for him—held Carver’s hands and his voice in check. That, and the support of Mindy’s good strong arm about his waist. He could no longer look at her. They’d woven inside her clothing, the hard scurry now an incessant undertone in her voice. His one glimpse of her face had brought an audible start out of him, turn away and refuse absolutely, lips pinched and head shaking, to tell her what had caused it.

They sought refuge in Mindy’s home, but merely traded a plague of rats outside with an infestation of them here. Had it not been for the steadying presence of his angel of gold, Carver would have become a gibbering madman, plunged headlong into a roil of vermin so thick he hardly dared to breathe for fear of inhaling them. His moans issued more freely here and he batted more frequently at the rats that dared to use his son’s angry face or his daughter-in-law’s more anguished one. He helped Mindy peel off the ratcrawl of his clothing and tuck him into bed. His mind waged war with itself. He twisted under the sheets, clever flatness of albino slime-weave sandwiching him in, their fleas now upon him, or perhaps it was the rats now diminished, many-legged and mutant. And yet he anchored on the unblemished floating form of his angel, a clarion solidity from above, his true unfevered self sustaining his wracked body as it waited for an eternity of suffering to pass.

The rat lady spoke to him, touched him, but the fleas streamed from her to him. And though he tried to go along with her according to his angel’s wishes, sometimes he had harsh words for her, and refused to drink, or, when he did drink, could not keep down the brackish water she brought to his lips. He thrashed, he sweated, he endured the rat lady’s presence, and worse—when she left to pick up some vitamin the obsidian rats shaped like a phone had slipped into her ear—her absence. In that night-choked void, he snagged his thoughts on Sarah, big-bellied in Tom’s home, his first grandchild inside her, and, despite his angel’s suasion away from the image, pictured a furry monstrosity eating its way out of that belly, red-eyed and scrabbling and slick with gore above the popcorn-popper burst of his daughter’s ravaged flesh.

*****

Harold Porter readied a hand to knock on Her Honor’s study door. It would be a meek knock and Thea would make him do it a second time, pretending not to have heard the first. Then, annoyed, she would say, “Come in.”

Surprise her. An infectious smile.

“Agreed,” he said, and strode in. Thea had set her shoes neatly to one side, but she still wore her fanciest mayoral garb and her posture screamed importance where she bent to the papers on her desk. They always puffed her up for a day or so, these visits to the governor, even though she and Harold agreed that he was nothing but the shell of a human being, an opportunist, a man not fit to govern his big toe let alone one of the largest states in the nation.

She started to turn her head, preparing to fix him in the underscore of her half-glasses’ curved upper rims, her imperious glare at the ready. Then she caught him on the periphery, stopped her neck’s slow swivel, and looked into his eyes, there and nowhere else. “Harold, what precisely do you think you’re doing?”

When he inhaled to respond, her aroma flooded in, the natural talcum-powder scent he’d found beneath her nose at their first kiss. It had helped prolong that kiss, and it had spawned others, but he’d forgotten it or grown used to it in the intervening years. His tit-for-tat response to her question, the prosaic one ready on his lips, glittered away like Tinkerbelle wandings, and instead he said, “Thea, sweetheart, I love the way you smell.”

Yummy yum yum. His companion traded winks with him, sexy little thing with her early-Thea features.

“Are you out of your mind?” Yanking her glasses off so that they came to rest on her bosom, she pointed a fat finger up at him, its abrupt angle, it amused him to note, in precise counterpoint to his penis. “Since when do you come barging into my workspace uninvited? And since when did it become all right to walk around this house without a stitch on, not to mention that?”

“It’s much the better way, honeybunch.” Harold fell to his knees, trying for languidity, but they cracked and he laughed. He went on all fours, stretched like a pudgy cat, and waggled his bottom. “Thea love, the carpet’s so soft and inviting.” He stroked its plush tufted pile and purred.

Thea shot to her feet. “Harold Porter, you’re fifty-five years old, you have a fat ugly paunch, it’s a Tuesday night, and the lights are on, bright and unforgiving. Do you have any idea how disgusting you look?”

I guess we’re a washout. Bemused simper.

“Come here, beautiful.” Lazing over on his back, he closed a hand about himself, hot columnar yum-yum. “This is for my sweetie.”

She lost her composure at that, fuming and sputtering at him, then stepping over his legs—warning him not to so much as think of grabbing her—to reach the study door. A moment later she was back, throwing his old canary-yellow terrycloth robe over his body like the cool dry slap of an ocean wave. “You cover yourself and start talking sense, or I’m going to demand a house call from Doctor Willis and insist he bring either a strait-jacket or the largest dose of Thorazine he can find.”

Better calm her.

“I guess.”

“You guess what?”

“Nothing, I was talking to her.” He closed the robe over him where he sat on the floor and shoelaced the sash, playing with the ends like rabbit ears. “To my guardian angel.”

She began to laugh as if he were joking; then he saw that she understood his easy dead-on seriousness: thirty years of marriage allowed such shorthand. Still, his new mood he could tell frightened her, gave her no dependable place in him to anchor, and that fear spilled out as rage. What was he on, what had he been drinking, couldn’t he see how much stress she was under, without having her husband, her reliable, compliant, mayoral helpmate, suddenly go off the deep end?

At his angel’s suggestion he soothed her, letting her steam billow out over ice. Short phrases, it’s all right, yes he understood, he was sorry; until the first wave of anger passed and she sat stunned and puffy in her swivel chair. Then he began—slowly at first, then with growing excitement as he relived it—his tale of the day’s great adventures, how the writer guy and the two kids, just by showing up in the square, had brought forth his companion and those of others, how he’d followed them home, how he’d listened for hours beneath the treehouse and shared fruit and witnessed the transformation of Mike DeSario, all the while enjoying the strengthening and deepening of his own guardian. He described her to Thea, tried to make her see what he saw, told her how closely tied she was to him, to what he’d been as a boy, and now to his overwhelming love for his wife. He’d always been shy about love, always let it be understood between them rather than spoken. But now his angel had freed him from that constraint, and he loved her deeply, his Thea, and he wanted so blessedly much now to make love to her, to show her how beautiful she was, to shoot his semen deep inside her and hear her cry out. The folds of his robe he angled aside as he finished, offering her the hard rude red love it barely concealed.

“Harold,” Thea said softly, “what have they done to you?”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Better look closer.

He did. “She’s not pleased?” Correcting. “You’re not—?”

“Joe will know what to do.” Thea lifted the phone, put it down. “What’s his number, I can’t think, Harold help me out.”

“My brother Joey? Six-two-one, something-something-something. Joey was a spry little thing, used to wrestle me to the rug, or try to, always rougher than—”

“That’s enough, Harold.” She thumbed her Rolodex, stopped, pointed the phone at him. “And you’re sleeping in the guest room tonight, assuming Joe and I decide not to hospitalize you right away.” She muttered the number and punched it in, blinking back tears.

“Aw, come on, Thea.” He touched her stockinged foot and she shot away as if stung, backing up against a metal filing cabinet.

“Harold don’t you . . . Hello Joe? Thank God you’re home. That Ted Jameson fellow and a couple of kids did a number on Harold, he’s gone off the deep end. No I’m not joking, you know me better than that. Listen Joe, this is serious, I need your help, I want you here right now. No, it can’t wait, you’ve got to see him.”

“Honey,” Harold said, “let me talk to him.”

His guardian made a gesture to ward off his intent, her head crooked to say Wait.

“Keep away from me and cover that thing up!” Thea’s fury, if anything, intensified. She pounded his brother’s ear into compliance, ordered him out into the night. In ten minutes he was there, Ford Fairlane sweeping up into their driveway and Joe in his civvies. Without his guns strapped on, Joe looked like a matron shorn of her hips. When he was in uniform, he reminded Harold—and this only just occurred to him—of a Restoration fop he’d once seen an engraving of, puffed breeches over effeminate thighs, a pair of walking sticks angled high, hands resting on their heads just like Joe’s hands rested on his gun handles when he adopted his quasi-Wayne, tough-guy stance. Joe didn’t crack a smile under his graying brush of a mustache, which made Harold giggle all the more. They talked about him as if he were elsewhere, two songless birds whose cage doors stood ajar and whose leg irons had no links, if only they would widen their eyes to see it. Joey, his dear brother Joey, apologized for not knowing what had happened on the town square, Carl Keppler had come into the station house acting odd and downplaying his previous report about some gathering at the gazebo he’d got out of his squad car to investigate; nothing, he’d said, it was nothing important. Yes, Thea said, Harold had told her they’d be returning to the square the next morning, nine o’clock or thereabouts. And yes, Joe solemnly nodded, bead-eyes a pair of bronze pips in his head, there’d be no problem breaking up the crowd soon’s it began to coagulate, no problem arresting this Jameson fellow for disturbing the peace and at least detaining the kids long enough to put a good scare into them. Then they’d see about Harold, about the best course for him and for her. Maybe a night’s sleep’d knock the craziness out of him.

Later, lying in the guest room darkness once Joey was gone, Harold thought he ought to feel shut out and lonely. But instead, with a fleeting thought for Thea’s upset and a shared laugh with his guardian about how like a lobster balanced self-importantly on its tail his brother looked, he mostly anticipated the surprise they were going to get the following morning when their angels sprouted and they saw, really saw, how confined their lives had been.

You are going to love your wife’s angel, she assured him again and again, her excited face hovering a breath above his body. You are going to love her and what she does for your Thea.

7. Auroville Finds Its Center

The next morning, her dad volunteered to detour out of his way to work and drop her off at Ward’s. June was pleased at her parents’ new attitude toward him, how they so gingerly asked, trying not to impose, that she invite him to dinner that night, if she liked and if he had the time. They radiated joy like kids on Christmas morning. Her mom promised to drop by the gazebo around ten, but Dad doubted he could escape a day of meetings at the plant.

He came in long enough, though, to rebloom his angel, the confluence of her and Ward being sufficient now to do the trick without Grampa, who breakfasted as usual in his treehouse. Her father’s angel flitted to the same quick rhythm as Ward’s, was as colorful and changeable, but took its hues from another palette, more pastels, more colored chalk than cartoonist’s ink, less fluorescent and tending more toward mixes of gray sobriety, though June hoped that with sustained exposure his tints would brighten, his more antic side win out over staid.

“Orange juice refill?” asked Joydrop, poised with the pitcher. June nodded and held out her filmy glass, loving the slow increase in heft, the brief babble of smooth cool liquid twisting into the tumbler, the surround of sunlight around the table. Four of them sat there, a quadrangle of affection, June and Joy and Ward’s mom and dear sweet Ward at June’s right. And hovering above, their guardians bent inward like cowled monks praying over a flame.

“Mom, are you sure you’ve had enough sleep?”

She looked startled at his question, not used to her son being so direct. Her features were petite and pretty but there was the faintest puffiness under her eyes which spoke of her interrupted night, two infants back to back, neither one an easy birth and the second a preemie not in the best of health. Laura’d touched on them only, but her guardian’s soothings had filled in much of the background. “I could use more,” she agreed, “but I’m not about to miss hearing you speak, Ward—at least the first few hours. My nine o’clock canceled, and my ten had twins yesterday, so the docket is clear.”

They ate their jellied muffins, crusty crunch smeared with preserves, a perfect complement to scrambled eggs and bacon. “Fat and cholesterol be damned,” Laura retorted to her angel, “I’ll have my egg breakfast, and so will these lovely people, so get used to it. Doctor’s orders.” Mock reproach prompted a look of mock humility, a begging your lady’s pardon, and a general round of laughter.

“I just think it’s so astounding,” said Joy, waving at her guardian, strung gems scintillating, his answering voice diamond-hard, diamond-rich. She emptied her pouch on her placemat. From the random pile of polished stones she picked out two tiny marbles, deep red, deep blue, in love with the light, and held them up, one in each white palm, as if they were votive offerings. Her guardian’s eyes—she called him Nemo—bending to them reflected red and blue fire. June heard a crystalline Thank you ripple from Nemo’s throat, a thousand distant wind chimes. Then Joy, beaming, repouched the marbles and elbowed in to sip smugly at her juice.

“Mom, I’d like June to look over my notes down at the clubhouse before we go.” Ward made too great a show about checking his watch. June felt a blush rising. “Could we leave in, say, twenty minutes?”

Timothy shimmied like a boy with a full bladder, one hand cupped over his mouth.

Jeannie said, Aren’t you going to tell him you’ve got your—, but June shushed her.

Ward’s mom sat back in her chair, coffee cup in hand, started to say something, then thought better of it. “No, I mean yes, yes,” hiding a smirk behind the rim of her cup but squinting her eyes around a twinkle. “Let’s make it a half hour. We’ll leave at quarter to nine.”

June felt as if their eyes were burning into her back as she and Ward crossed the endless lawn and stepped into his cottage. Switching on the light, he fumbled, holding her too tight, Timothy galumphing through the air like an inept ballet dancer. She broke the kiss, his face angling after her like a wounded animal face, and told him she was having her period. Simple, direct, not hard to say at all with Jeannie nodding her encouragement.

Ward looked confused.

“You do know what a period is?”

“Well yeah, pretty much.”

But Timothy shook his head and Jeannie prompted her with a glance. She explained it. The angels amazed her anew. Without them, she would have been tripping all over herself, awkward and embarrassed to be telling such things to her boyfriend. But Timothy and Jeannie made it as easy as breathing to go right to the truth, to open up and tell Ward just what he needed to know in just the right way.

“So we can’t make love?” he asked. There was a hint of pleading there, still some wound, but mostly he’d come about into the comforting embrace of her explanation and, Timothy helping, was adjusting quite well to the upcoming week’s reality.

“No, but we can hug a lot,” she said, enclosing him in her arms. He smelled great, like sand dunes and sea breezes. She kissed his ear. “You really have notes?”

“A few.”

“I’d like to hear them.” A lip-kiss, too long; he clenched. “Oops, sorry.”

“You are so great,” he said.

“I know. You too.” She reached behind her for his hands, untwined his arms, and kissed his boyish knuckles, then led him to the bed and jounced down upon it, patting the mattress. “Rehearsal time.”

Ward shimmied something white out of his back pocket, unfolding the bent piece of loose-leaf paper. It crinkled like parchment. The puppy dog look left him, his face now alive with animation as he launched into his football play diagram of ideas, pointing to them as he read and glossing them, crediting some of them to Timothy, who bowed and did his best to blush in mock humility. Ward knelt eagerly on the bed as June added encouragement and suggestions of her own, but her mind was much less on the substance of Ward’s notes than on Ward himself, how much in love with him she was, how quickly and comfortably he’d grown into the role of spokesman for their odd threesome, how thoroughly he’d emerged from his shell of isolation.

*****

When Grampa, answering their knock, announced he was thick into his final revision and printing but would join them later downtown, say eleven, Ward amazed himself with a simple nod and an “Okay,” no twinge of fear, no shyness telling him he couldn’t handle things. Esme’s reassuring smile over Grampa’s shoulder as he turned away helped too, the essence of his grandfather’s love beneath what seemed an abrupt dismissal.

His mom parked along Reservoir near Quartz and walked with them to the town square, ahead of them at first, deep in thought, sucking on a lozenge, her butterscotch wave of hair breaking below the collar of her doctor’s outfit. In the air behind her, so close his chin seemed to covet that hair as a beard, her angel floated along, jaybird naked, Buddha-plump, a burdenless clump of hairless flesh bonded liquidly one air-cushioned inch from her body. “Sorry,” she said at his whisper, scooping back to draw Ward and June to either side. “Bad habit: hospital absorption.”

A few strangers bloomed and followed them and a small contingent of those who’d glimpsed their car from the town square came up to greet them, reversing themselves then to serve as an advanced phalanx, their colorful angels in the air like guy-wired Macy’s Day balloons. A surge of cheers rose up as they reached the square. Ward couldn’t believe his eyes. Monday there’d been two dozen; yesterday maybe eighty; today the faithful had returned with family, with friends, some highly skeptical no doubt, others struggling to unflicker a hint of companion imperfectly cajoled from concealment by a bloomed loved one’s coaxings. Those who so struggled—one of Gregerson’s waitresses, an old man he had seen enfixtured in the public library, a thin, suited woman hugging a portfolio of legal briefs perhaps to her chest—saw their struggles rewarded as he and June walked past them on their way to the gazebo.

“Knock ‘em dead, tiger,” his mom confided, stooping as she said it, and then she was gone and it was just him and June, holding hands, passing through the belly of the beast on their way to the stage. The organism rippled and swayed about them, its comforting peristalsis felt but not seen. All Ward could fix on were individual faces washing in and away, radiant beneath the strengthening benevolence of their guardians. And such guardians, such textures and shapes and colors as he’d never seen. Timothy and Jeannie wove and glided through them, imparting assurance and love almost palpable in its intensity.

“Sir?” One man was on the stage. City sound man for the Tuesday concerts, the projectionist, his mom had said, for the downtown theater. White short-sleeved shirt, bony elbows, red bow tie, strain stretching his face taut, as a shocked emaciated pasty-faced guardian squeezed up between his shoulderblades and hung vultured and gasping above his head. He tapped the mike twice, then lowered it to Ward’s height, said, “Thank you sir, ma’am,” nodding to June, and bounded down the gazebo steps into the crowd.

“My grampa—”

The mike squealed and he backed away.

“My grampa apologizes for being late and all.” Voice sounded weird and out of sync. “He’ll be by around eleven or so. Boy, I can’t believe how many of you there are and how great you look. Hello, and good morning!”

At his gesture, June leaned in, laughed, and answered the crowd’s greeting with one of her own. “Hi, it’s great to see you all again.” Then Ward took the microphone, but sirens stopped him, a moving whoop of them coming up Main from the west, then an echoing whipple from the east like a faulty speaker kicking in on the far side of a room. A police car eased into sight from down post office way and took a right onto Reservoir, its parade-crawl in stately contrast to the siren’s crazy wail. It parked wrong way around, edging the square, as the other car did the same on Main directly between the gazebo and Town Hall. Plug was pulled on the sirens, which blipped up and gone, but the bubble lights still spun.

“Isn’t that the sheriff?” June said.

Ward nodded. The driver of the car on Reservoir was a young policewoman who’d come to school last fall to talk about traffic safety. She looked less friendly now as she got out, and Sheriff Porter emerged on the car’s far side, bullhorn in hand. The mayor and her husband slid over and unbent from the back seat, him looking impish and angeled (and Ward remembered him now from yesterday), her wearing a face stiff with rectitude. The four of them moved into the square, the sheriff in the lead, droning about illegal assembly without permit, ordering folks to go on about—

But then he stopped.

Ward glanced at the other squad car where the sheriff seemed to be staring. Two young cops, closer by half from where they’d parked than Sheriff Porter, had sprouted fine strapping guardians and now drifted into the crowd, not to disperse it but to join it.

“Officers Blake and Bermel, stand apart—” His voice had a waver to it, a crack in his authority. The bullhorn fell to his side, dropped out of his hand to the lawn. He tore his shades off, his eyes randoming in disbelief from one part of the crowd to another.

Check out the mayor, Timothy said.

Her face was blanched white as a pigeon wing, and her husband’s arm was around her, his fingers splayed across a girdled stretch of mayoral buttock, urging her unresisting if as-yet-unmotivated body past his stunned brother. The policewoman followed them, unpinning her dark red hair and shaking it free; it tumbled past her shoulders, blackbirds arcing in graceful curves up out of it and mingling behind her into a black, winged angel with a face of smiles. The mayor, almost as if in response, bloomed her own guardian, nearly a twin of her husband’s, an achingly beautiful pre-Raphaelite floater with long ribboned tresses. She filled out as they drew closer, took on luster and natural blush, until at last the mayor kissed her husband as they walked and then broke away, laughing, toward the crowd.

“Mayor Cosgrove, yes, welcome, do come join us,” said Ward, not quite believing his boldness, but it didn’t feel bold, it felt right. Timothy nodded. “You too, sheriff.”

Sheriff Porter tottered forward like a man in casts, waving his assent, then wiped his face and found his legs and came freely on, an easy sway to his hips that Ward had never seen on him, always so stiff, always so cautious, as if he kept some terrible secret hidden. Not so now. Out of his uniform, out of his pores, like soundless teakettle steam there seeped and swirled a white mist that spiraled about him as he walked, corkscrewed and billowed and burst apart like gossamer ribbon against his chest. His brother met him on the way, hugged him spontaneously, a hug fully reciprocated, and walked arm in arm with him into the mass of citizens, who greeted the sheriff like a friend waking from a bad dream.

Ward spoke now, and spoke well, Timothy prompting him when he faltered. Old stories mostly, about what a trial it had been to know his companion was real yet be obliged to conceal his faith from others, about what a comfort the Shy Friends Club had been, and how liberating it had been to confide at last in his grandfather. As he spoke, the traffic along Main grew less distracting, in part because the mike allowed him to compete, but mostly because there was a new spirit of community evolving before his eyes, a real and not simply metaphorical sense that this band of people—and those yet to join them—were family hitherto unrealized but family no less for that. Passersby, many of them, wandered in and stayed, though some veered off, faces sour, quickening their pace, shaking the magic out of their heads. Mindy Rutherford and Carver Haskell were missing, and Ward made a mental note to take Grampa and June by her house later. The DMV official who’d scowled away on Monday was now in attendance, fixed—him and his intent angel—on Ward’s every word, his lips blotting the dove-winged hand of a young woman who could have been, but clearly wasn’t, his daughter.

June spoke when he was through, simple, short, not so motor-mouthed as Timothy’d let him become. Ward watched her from the folding chair she’d warmed behind him, angled now forward, his feet on the front rung. She was beautiful at the mike, her voice melting his insides with bliss as she spoke. It was a treat to watch Jeannie mother-hen her, a whisper every so often, those radiant eyes warming him on her quick glance backward. They were a stunningly lovely dance of divinity, these two, and he was as mesmerized as the crowd by what June said and how she said it. Her mom had come by at the tail end of his remarks and she glowed now with pride, angel-wrapped, near the concrete drinking fountain at the center of the walkway.

Ward didn’t have a clue as to what else he might say, but when he took the mike and saw those hundreds of faces opening up to him, he knew without any prompting from his companion what made most sense. “I think, until my grampa arrives, that those of you who wish, should feel free to come up here and share with the rest of us what all this has meant to you. June and Grampa and I may have started things rolling, but we don’t have all the answers by any means. Sound okay?”

It clearly did, but to prevent the stage from being rushed, Ward quickly added that he and June would pick a new speaker after each person went, and that they hoped everyone would keep to ten minutes tops. Ward’s mom had to leave about twenty minutes later, blowing him a kiss during Deputy Tim Bermel’s remarks and walking away, her angel backpacked behind, past the swirl of the squad car bubble and on up Reservoir.

In so doing, she missed by minutes the arrival of the DeSario family and the minor sensation they caused.

*****

Mike, older, more stoic, used to hiding things behind silence, had caught wise quicker than Calvin. Poor squirt had gone on a truth jag, pleading “She’s real!” with every smack of the belt, both brothers with their faces swollen and bruised, bodies bared and bent over Mike’s bed. He’d shut up and his dad had gradually shifted from alternating strokes to swat-the-pig-that’s-still-squealing, Mom in her nightgown at the door sobbing for him to stop and enduring his “Get the fuck outa here (smack), you’re next, Kitty (smack), you see any fucking angels here, I don’t see no fucking angels (smack), all I see is welts on shit, babe (smack), fucking turd-sons with backskin not tough enough to stand up under a whipping!” In the harsh glare of the overhead light, Calvin’s angel fizzed and swayed about his head, its carbonate mouth spilling out panicked words of assurance. The pupils of Mike’s own steely companion had hardened into rivets.

Later, after Dad had yanked Calvin out of Mike’s room and thrown him across the hall into his own room, slamming the door shut so that Calvin’s hoarse sobs were stifled in the night and then fell still, and after he’d made good on his threat to Mom, and the house itself, though it rang in his head a good long while, went silent, Mike rose to look in on his brother. He held him and felt his tears moisten his chest, and then he applied ointment and gauze and tape strips to the worst of his wounds. Then he put Calvin to bed, silver words soothing the buzz in his head, and eased under his own covers, careful, as Calvin had been, to lie on his front. The dark thoughts had come—the drawer, the gun, the hole as big as all outdoors, a puff of red-tinged feathers spiraling through a rush of blood—but he simply watched them, nodded to them, and let them go. And to his amazement, sleep eased in and found him.

Now the Honda bristled with ugliness. In the front seat, his mom stared ahead, neck swiveled slightly right but not enough that Mike couldn’t see the discoloration beneath her eye makeup. Her long left sleeve bunched up where her fingers came across her belly to grip her arm. Calvin sat zombified behind her, hunched away from the pressure of the seat back and seemingly staring out his window at passing houses. But Mike could see, and knew Calvin could too, his bubbly companion plastered against the glass, shimmying along its inside pane as though he were rain shapes inching by outside on a watery, sixty-mile-an-hour day. Mike’s right arm crested the top of the seat. Welts stretched like stapled rope across his back. If his hand dropped behind, it would fall on the stock of the Mossberg Bullpup pump-action shotgun that lay in the grocery well upon a green towel so the Honda’s red fuzz wouldn’t fuck up its works. Same shotgun his father kept propped in the hall closet against marauders. Don’t do it, yet again; his guardian’s caution was getting old, but Mike had to admit the temptation was strong.

The sight of the squad car, bubble flashing, gave him hope. But the old man took it as a challenge and pulled up bumper to bumper, yanking on the handbrake so they all jerked forward, snapped up on the catch at his left which clicked open the back, killed the engine and pocketed the keys, and swore at the crowd for a pack of zombies. Then he was out the door, leaning the seat forward and shoving his head back in to bark at them all to get the fuck out. His shoes crunched gravel like Rice Krispies and he popped open the hatchback, but Mike was wincing out the driver’s side as his mom leaned in to help Calvin, and all he could think was how beautiful and fresh a day it was despite the wicked sniff of Honda exhaust that lingered in the air and how helpless he felt to prevent his father’s death.

Keep them close to the car, meaning Calvin and his mom, but Dad cradled the shotgun and closed the hatchback, ordering them onto the sidewalk and then forward, at his left but not crowding him. Get between him and them, and Mike grunted, “Right,” following his steel guardian as if he were beacon and shield. An old guy was talking on the stage, Ward and June seated behind him, and all eyes were on him. But a child with her thumb in her mouth tugged on her mommy’s dress and pointed in their direction. And the mother’s head turned, and the woman’s next to her, and the old man’s words fell away as the crowd shifted focus. His dad yelled for that fucker Ted Jameson, shotgun now aimed dead on into the crowd, butted up against his shoulder to take the recoil. And Mike saw Sheriff Porter and a lady cop drop to the ground and draw a bead on him, the sheriff shouting to throw down his weapon, count of three, put it down or they’d shoot him dead, and his dad not hearing it but just screaming for Jameson, moving forward and then an ivory face floating out of his face like egg whites from a bubbling clattering shell-crack in a saucepan, but his dad not taking to it at all, resisting it, the screams for Ted Jameson coming faster, his grip tightening on the shotgun, Sheriff Porter’s “One!” going by unheard, angel parachute billowing from his chest where Mike could see blood if he didn’t—”Two!”—and then he dashed rightward, his guardian showing the way in beneath his father’s blocked perception at the left arm, a steel corridor followed straight along, no variance, no time to think, just the precise focus of arms and hands from below, in and up to deflect, and the gun slipping and going off, the blast of sound buffeting his ears, butt raking his father’s chest like a tomahawk slamming down, and the two of them slipping on the grass, the world pulled out from under them, shotgun clattering away in the fumble like a curtain rod over carpet, then the tackle and pin, his arm yanked behind his back, face to rich wet grass, cold metal tensed above his ear, and his father ridden by the sheriff in the same predicament but safe, he was safe. Two other cops pounded up, cuffed his father, eased the lady cop off him and helped him to his feet.

“Keep that creature away from me!” his dad shouted. “My eyes! It’s burning my eyes!”

Mike hobbled over to check on Calvin and his mother. The crowd was streaming up toward them as Sheriff Porter placed his dad under arrest and read him his rights. But he smiled as he said them, no grimness, yet not precisely a smile either; it simply looked that way from the natural set of his mouth. June rushed up, followed by Ward at the head of the crowd. His father wept, his guardian huge and white and winged before him, not judging, just displaying openly his life; but Mike could well imagine the impact of that. As people streamed around them, his dad’s guardian glowed like melted butter, and his own companion grew as intense as a heat lamp turned on in his guts.

His father’s eyes went ragged. The deputies tried to hold him but Sheriff Porter said, “Let him go,” and he hit the ground solidly with his back, cuffed hands raised palm out, like a flesh flower resisting the sun. The angel lay above him, soothing, a fought blanket of love. Mike could almost hear his words. But his father buckled and twisted under him, eyes averted, sweat and denial pouring from him until at last, as they watched, he broke. Tears of sorrow alternated with tears of joy, and someone, a young girl of no more than eight, rushed in with a handkerchief wet from the fountain to mop his brow. He kissed her hands.

Mike stood with Mom and Calvin. They watched apart, bruised outside and in. When June’s guardian prompted her to ask absurdly that his dad be allowed to stay and Porter as absurdly agreed—though he refused to drop all charges, saying that Al DeSario would have to cool his heels for at least a night downtown—Mike and the family sat beside him but did not look at him, or only furtively, as he at them. He couldn’t stand it, couldn’t concentrate on anything but the pocket of misery they’d been stuck in, the way it felt like they were all under arrest. Finally he got up, found the left lip of the stage, signaled Ward who ducked behind the mayor speaking her joys into the microphone. “Listen, man, I gotta be next,” he said; his urgent warrior mingled with Ward’s angel so precisely, so perfectly, that he had his assent an instant before Ward nodded.

He lingered at the lip, half on Mayor Cosgrove, half on the crowd. Editor of the Auroville Gazette was burying his ecstasy behind a camera, old guy’s got it up, yeah no kidding, cub reporter by his side, goggling just like his boss, pair of bird-eyed guardians over them, must’ve just arrived. Preacher man from over yonder—Fisher, Fleischer something like that—squatting by the mayor’s husband and looking, bunched-up guardian and all, like he’d lost his best friend, stricken, yeah heartstruck, poor joe. Mike glanced off the wound of his family, tight in the throat. Then the mayor wrapped it up, smiling to him as she passed him—a smile that was genuine, warm, accepting, the whole of her humanity in one look washing over him, bolstering his courage. No barriers and that’s okay. “Kind of scary too I guess,” he muttered, but then he was behind the mike and the surge of humanity hit him full in the face.

“Listen,” he said, adjusting the head, “it blows me away, I’ve hated these sorts of gatherings, always felt I was being judged—but that’s bogus suddenly, I can see the remains of that in your eyes and all, but it’s been blown open by these guys,” gesturing to his angel, silver gleam of strength and nobility like an oak, “and what I feel is acceptance, not the same garbage turned inside-out, but a natural acceptance like you get with rushing water.

“But that’s not why I’m up here.”

His slim hands gripped the mike stand.

You can do it.

Yeah, I know. He looked at his mom, her arm around Calvin. He forced himself to look at his dad, whose angel seemed to curve at his back, a recess of cathedral stone, protective and intimate. His old man didn’t look at him, shame averting his eyes. “Dad, I just wanted to say one thing.” His throat constricted. He relaxed it and moved closer to the mike. “I wanted to kill you last night for what you did to Calvin and Mom, what you did to me. And I wanted to kill you on the way over here. I coulda done it too. I coulda reached behind me when you pulled up, and I coulda swung the shotgun up and jammed the barrel into the seatback in front of me and blown you away. It would have served you right, you know it would.” His father curved a hand up over his mouth, moisture in the pained squints of his eyes. “I kinda didn’t want to get up here and say it. It’s our dirty laundry and all. But you aired it in a big way a while ago, brought these people into it, and my good friend here and me, we figure they became family then in a weird way. They’re family now, helping me out and making it feel okay to say all this. But, Dad, you’re my family, you and Calvin and Mom, and—” a sob wracked his chest and he burst out like a sniveling little boy, high-pitched and hurting, but that didn’t matter, not one good goddamn, and he let the cry rise and subside, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, “—and as much as I hate what you did to us, Dad, I love you. That’s what I wanted to say up here, I love you, old man, and I think we can do better, I think with a little guidance we can make it, we can drop all the crap and make it better again, the four of us.” And then his father rose to his feet and came forward, the sheriff not moving to stop him, tears wet on his face like spring water trickling down rock. And he stumbled onto the stage and Mike held his father for the longest time, the cuffed hands clasped between their chests like a prayer of flesh and bone, angels of white and silver conjoined above them. And Mom and Calvin met them as they descended. And again they sat, this time a tight in-turned circle pretty much oblivious to the speeches which followed, letting only the song of them underscore the looks and gestures that passed back and forth among them like found treasures.

*****

Harold Porter loved the way Thea’s beloved townsfolk smelled. On the walk back to their grassy seats in front of the gazebo after Al DeSario had been subdued, he’d told Thea he needed a sniffing tour and had woven among ambling Aurovillians, rioting inwardly at the sensual assault, his phallus again erect. He inhaled the odors seeping through filtering cloth: his brother’s tight-pored after-the-prom scent from high school days; a tourist couple, the man in need of a bath, whose underlying bouquet was a rich mix of forest and ocean that shouted Santa Cruz; Kitty DeSario’s bruised skin, the savory lip-close of her vulva, the hand-lingerings everywhere from her husband most dominantly but with the unmistakably youthful tang of Luke Petrakis still apparent twenty years after the fact.

Thea had taken the stage and was baring the loveliest facets of her soul as she’d never done before in so public a way. It was beautiful, a dilly, a doozy, Thea’s speech. Partway into it, Harold spied his old bookstore friend on the right fringe of the crowd. “Lyle,” he said as he sat down, “I can see your angel today, nice lemon-smooth lady, a real find.” Lyle joked about being able to see Harold’s hard-on and they both had a chuckle about that, but there was no leer to it, no homophobic backoff from Lyle, just a good-natured ribbing, and his erection persisted. It hung in there through Reverend Fleischer’s shell-shocked squat beside him. It hung in there through Harold’s assurances to the distraught preacher and the poor man’s wander-away along the perimeter of the crowd. It even hung in there, thick and radiant against Thea’s girdled buttocks as she sat before him luxuriating in concealed caresses, through the public exposure and the public healing of the DeSario family’s worst wounds. It was sexual to its very core, a thing of blood and seed and heat, no denying that; but it was so much more. It throbbed with life and vitality and an insatiate eagerness to please. It took the measure of the town, the life imbuing the crowd and the fresh blooms above them, angel substance waving like fields, bristling with communiqués to their charges.

Thea wondered once, confiding, whether she were still mayor, refreshingly unconcerned one way or the other, the ego-grab gone. He’d told her he thought so, and indeed it was clear from the way folks looked at her and referred to her from the stage that that was true. A renewed sense of community was developing, still nascent, as the hours wore on. The speeches bound them, the incessant picture-taking of Clarence Dietz and his rookie’s pad-in-hand attempts at questions, and especially the arrival of Ted Jameson from up Bedford Avenue, Moses come from the mountain by the way the people—and Harold did not exclude himself—rose up to greet him. He ranted for a while from the stage, but soon relaxed when he saw that Ward and June had matters well in hand and he wasn’t “obliged to be anyone’s messiah,” as he put it. Still, his presence, on and off the stage, was as a sun banking from behind cloud cover to brighten the field of no-longer-hidden guardians, to refresh those fortunate enough to be on the town square of Auroville at this hour, and to reveal, deeply dimensioned, with no compromise to anyone’s individuality, the essential unity which groped its way now toward definition.

When Ward tried to break things up at three and they resisted, Jameson grabbed the mike, telling everyone to go home and come back tomorrow at nine: no more speeches, no more focus on the tired three, just a day of celebration; bring food and blankets, bring friends, let it all unfold as it will. Harold’s brother had his car full, what with Al DeSario being hauled off to jail, so Thea commandeered the deputies and requested, not insisted, that they drive the two of them home. Thea snuggled with him in the back seat, tonguing his ear like an aroused teenybopper, and he liked that, liked it a lot. “Forgive me for doubting you, Harold,” she said, and through her volley of lip-smacking word-stopping kisses he forgave her many times over.

He wondered about the deputies. But his angel, whom he’d begun to call Caroline, assured him. When he glanced askew, he found she was right about them. The one driving seemed content to drive, eyes on the road and scanning the town for anything untoward but occasionally mirroring into the back seat for a good-natured glimpse. Officer Bermel, on the other hand, was turned ninety degrees in his seat, his head another ninety, enjoying full-on the groping Thea and Harold were engaged in. Again no leer. Their passion was sanctioned, indeed divinely replicated, by the angels enmeshed above them. Bermel’s eyes held no hint of lust, though there was surely boyish excitation there, evident most plainly in his bright-faced guardian. But what shone fiercely was simple gratitude, his eyes brimming with it, for the privilege of witnessing at least the beginnings of their lovemaking.

As Thea shoved him out of the squad car, their angels a whipped froth of meringue above them, she tossed Bermel and Blake a breathless thank-you and told them to take the rest of the day off. Then she pawed and thighed and soul-kissed Harold toward the door. Carrie Meacham across the way paused in her troweling to stare open-mouthed at what was going on and Harold started a sheepish wave, but Thea keyed the door open and yanked him inside and Miss Carrie Meacham vanished behind the shumpf of the door kissing its frame.

“Honey,” he said as Thea yanked the shirt out of his pants and gave abrupt freeing twists to each button, “are you sure you’re feeling okay?” not to stop her, no not in the least, but only to take the pulse of her mental well-being. The vestibule wall felt grainy and cool against his back.

“I’ve got the need,” she said, her hands at his belt and below. “Like in Berkeley.” She licked his neck, took a fold of chin into her mouth and tongued it until he had to unsuction it away in a tickle of laughter. “Our first apartment.” Her hands thrust down the back of his pants, grabbing his boxer-shorted buttocks and squeezing. “Where we did it everywhere all the time.” Like lumps of dough, Caroline’s face pressed against the face of Thea’s angel: Siamese cheeks. Their multiple limbs stretched about one another and down to touch and bless their charges. Thea ground her groin against his penis and looked to her left, the sudden rotation of her head turning his right cheek to the wall like a tango dancer. “There, on the living room rug.” She unthrust her hands and broke away, kicking off her shoes and undoing her clothing as she went. Her angel drift-gestured longingly toward Caroline.

It had been years beyond years since they’d made love anywhere but in bed, lights out, all dark, once a month on a Saturday night if he was lucky. Now Thea runnered back drapes, ratcheted up blinds, welcomed in the sun and fresh air, tossed a few plump pillows on the floor, stripped off her everything, and made like the naked maja for him, only not quite so modest when it came to the angle one leg met the other.

Lover, Caroline whispered, though it was also love her, and she repeated it, easy to the throb of blood.

He shucked his clothing like dead husks, sunken chest with its wisps of hair, belly rippled red with the pattern of underwear elastic, bare feet slapping vestibule tile as he unsocked his feet, steadying himself against the wall. His body breathed free. What foolishness, Harold thought, these senseless coverings are. He could smell the pulse of his arousal, the epidermal triumph of being undressed and headed for love in his own home. As he drew close to his wife, he thought he’d swoon with the joy of it, angel magic in the air above her but not blocking the swatch of sunlight that lay across her breasts and belly, light tuft of private hair fanning up like sea kelp. She smelled of dunes and conch shells and slaps of surf lightly bubbling down slopes of flat wet sand. He knelt at her right and touched her body, here, here, awed at its beauty, at how soft it was, how moist. She gleamed and their guardians bled once more into one another, extending phantom hands to touch them where their bodies touched in love. Thea stroked his sex, her eyes blessing the soft wrinkles she bunched over the red-rimmed ellipse of its head, a clear bead of fluid urged out and thumbed about to slicken him. He hardened her nipples with his left hand, softened her below with his right, pink and puffed and baby-tender in the moistness of her folds. He brought his face to hers, seeing her anew, their original love shining through the deadening crust it had suffered over the decades. Tears welled in her eyes and brought tears to his, evaporations of regret and exhalations of love. He drank them with his kisses, kissed deep into her mouth, tasting that sweetness again, that lost upper-lip aroma that had enticed him into her to begin with, her fingers tugging at him, his fingers in exploratory swirl. “I love you, Thea,” he gentled into her ear, and she responded, “ohIloveyou,” all one word, and said it over and over like a sigh until it vaporized with her exhalation. Angelic voices melded about them in duet, no words, just ahs and ohs in a perfect blend of rise and fall, the visible phenomenon of their bodies thinning and mixing and falling like drapes of breeze warm against the flesh of their charges. He spent a fleeting eternity at each breast, nosing it like an infant, setting his sense of smell on an atavistic pursuit of milk, eying the blue veins and the wet red wrinkle of the areole and the blunt stippled plug of the nipple, tightening it, sculpting it, coaxing it into released groans above. Then he nostriled in bloodhound sniff down Thea’s body, soft belly skin and the squozen Oriental squint of her navel caressed by angel hands, as was his face as he meandered. Beads of moisture gleamed in the sunlight of her filamental hair. He tasted them, found the pouch, filled his mouth with the riotous delights of her vulva, nosing deep into her as he feasted on her clitoral flesh. Thea came then, quickly, deeply, her voice rising from the pit, pressing up into his face until her need for his sex eclipsed the delights of his tongue. A clear egg of angel passion enclosed them, the mouths multiplied and O’ing like loops of lace as Harold covered her and kissed her and eased his love deep inside her and felt the walls of her love and the loving hand of her companion explode the love up and out of him into her so that his mind and his heart and his soul willingly lost themselves in the blessed outpouring of love, the screams, the screams at last freeing him like a rutting beast after years of grunted stiflings.

*****

There were times, extremely rare, when Clarence Dietz wished Auroville were big and bustling enough to require a daily. This was one of them.

The Gazette hit the stands, or more precisely eased onto them and slap-flopped against doors and driveways, on Wednesday mornings: a whole week until the next issue and the staff gone for the afternoon. He developed roll after roll himself, calling Tad Stevens repeatedly away from his keyboard to the darkroom to inspect the hanging negatives, to get his take on the proper crop and focus, to share his excitement at seeing the images rise out of the submerged paper under his rubber-tipped tongs. “Look at that, Tad, isn’t that something?” he’d say in the dead crimson air of the darkroom, and Tad agreed it was, in that annoying yes-sir way of his, a quiet boy, gifted at cobbling words and a force to reckon with when he went after a story, but he was just too damned polite for his own good. Even so, it was clear that he shared Clarence’s astonishment over the pictures squeegeed off and put through the dryer.

“I really like this one,” said Tad.

“Yeah, nice tight shoulders-up shot. Can’t tell why the mayor is smiling so broadly but that’s for us to know, right Tad? One angel beaming down at them, hers it looks like. The other one, Jesus it’s amazing, staring straight into the lens, enough to blow the top of your head off.”

Pulitzer material, said Clarence’s companion, with a look like a pinched priest. Clarence loved him: no side trips, cut to the chase, slice away the baloney.

“What did he say?” asked Tad.

“Couldn’t hear him? He said it was prize quality and maybe he’s right. Perfect composition, such all-American smiles, not an ounce of fake, coming right from the heart, not to mention elsewhere. And those guardians!”

“Every one of them.”

“That’s it. I look at every one of these photos, the negatives alone break my heart, and then when the suckers are enlarged, I swear it makes you want to wet your pants like organ music vacuuming your skull in a cathedral.”

Tad’s guardian was bent to him. Clever, intellectual in mien. Goddamn Auroville High had given him some really great kids over the years. He thought of Luke. Tad said, “I wonder if it might be an optical illusion.”

“That’s the sharpest image I’ve ever seen.”

Call him. A stone in a pond.

“It’s almost too sharp,” countered Tad.

“You know who might be interested in this?”

“Like they leap off the paper, as if it’s our minds that somehow—”

“Luke Petrakis.”

Tad looked at him. “The CNN guy?”

“Auroville High, class of ‘77.”

“That was a really cool documentary the other night. But I like his live reporting better.”

“You and millions of others. He’s got the talent; he had it when he was sitting there where you are. Knows how to find the interesting stuff, zero right in on it, switch away when it wanes, find the next thing.”

“‘The high-class Geraldo,’” Tad quoted.

“That’s marketing hype. He began it during the Gulf War. Some of it luck, mostly talent. Luke’s never lost touch, either. Calls me every year, June sixteenth, the anniversary of the day I hired him.” Snaking around the baffles into the cooler office air, Tad at his heels, he keyed open the thin drawer under his desktop and rummaged through some papers until he found it. A pink While You Were Out slip, Luke’s private line at CNN.

He punched it in, 4:35 here, 7:35 in Atlanta, even if Luke wasn’t elsewhere on the globe, not likely, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be in his office. Three rings, then voicemail kicked in, that annoying universal lady with the underlay of snippy arrogance to her tone, “if it is urgent that you speak with someone now,” yeah, yeah, he hit zero like she was about to fulsomely urge him to do, dead line for a moment, then an admin assistant came on. Luke’s in town but he’s probably home packing for a few days in the Bahamas, vacation, no she was sorry she couldn’t give his home number, unlisted for a reason, who did he say he was, yes sir that name, mighty glad to be speaking to you, Luke gets to talking about you, Mister Dietz, every year at the Christmas party, yes he does, and—oh, yes, sorry, she had it right there. And then Clarence had it and was punching it in, swearing at Luke not to have left for the airport.

Calm down. Pinched pruned face, but old Sourpuss was right. No good pumping up the blood pressure.

“Luke here.” First ring. Famous voice, a hint of caution. Even unlisted, he no doubt had unwanted calls.

“Luke, it’s Clarence Dietz.” Tad’s eyes were wide and Clarence nodded to him. The boy’s angel looked as red-cheeked and merry as a backpage Santa.

There was a second of silence at the other end, then an explosion of ebullience, famous voice gone manic with glee. When at last the voice spiraled down an octave and slowed to near normal, Clarence told him why he’d called. He prefaced it with “remember you told me if I ever had a story so hot” and with “you’re not going to believe this, but trust me, you can hear how rational I sound, I am not joking, I’m on the up and up,” and even so, Luke thrashed about like a pike reluctant to be landed.

But eventually, there came an inflection point.

And Luke Petrakis became very interested.

Very interested indeed.

8. Awakenings and Losses

Thursday morning, giving the final chapters one last editorial gloss, Grampa realized at last what had put him off about Thalia: Too like Mozart. Safe, tidy, precise. Another outing in the old vein; a slight departure, sure, from elves and fairies, but scratch away the nice conceit which linked anti-choicers to bookburners and all you had was the same old reliable T. E. Jameson gavotte.

It’s a gem, Esme offered from where she sprawled. It scintillates.

“It’s done. That’s all I care about.” The LaserJet eked out page after page, a blessed whisper of mechanism after the mind-shattering clatter of his clunky old daisywheel, but its predictable rhythm nevertheless reinforced his dissatisfaction with Thalia as a soulless bagatelle, a miniature music box with a pirouetting ballerina on top.

That’s cuz your mind’s opening to new possibilities.

“Yeah, no shit.”

You’ve seen your new audience.

“And I like what I see.”

They’ve always been there. Just crusted over.

That was so. He’d felt it the day before as he came into the town square. People he’d always thought dull and predictable had manifested the most amazing of companions. He’d always been puzzled when any of them had gathered the courage to accost him and confide in stultifying monotones their admiration for his books, all of his books. He saw now, and realized he’d always known, that when these folks read a novel, their fascinating hidden true selves came to the fore for those precious moments, feasting on the magic of his tales, the magic missing from their everyday lives. He’d fed that beast. But, sensing deep inside himself how confined it was, he’d held back nutrient without realizing he was doing so. How free he had felt spinning Thalia out of his head—and how cramped it seemed now, an oxygen-poor attic where roof and clutter conspired to bend one low and hold one motionless.

Glancing at his bookshelves, he thought of—

Oedipus? Maybe so. Things keep on like this, I’d say it’s remotely possible.

“We’re going to get that sucker out there.” But she knew, and he knew she knew, he was just blowing air. Old Oedipus represented major departure, a blast of raw ruddy erotic energy he doubted pucker-stuck America would ever be ready for, not the way the pendulum swinging away from the sixties had defied the laws of historical gravity and stubbornly refused to swing back.

And yet . . .

And yet the stirrings he’d felt downtown, the shared simmerings of freedom and creativity and brewing ecstasy, these gave him new hope. The Oedipus book would resonate nicely with a transformed America, would celebrate it and buttress it, a trellis for the righteous vines of license. And the follow-on ideas that exploded from his fingertips into his laptop (as his PC busied itself printing Thalia) like the plumping of grapes, bunched and shiny and thick with purple, in the sun—these ideas would fill out in the newborn light of liberty, would take on tight round sounds bursting with implication and assurance. It could happen, it really could, a true renaissance of goodness that would find its reflection everywhere, not simply in his fiction, but in the lives of every wakened dreamer, a denial of ill will and violence so complete that they withered and fell, dwindling into dust.

Quite a ways.

“Yes, I know. But I’ve got the faintest foretaste of it on my tongue tip, and it’s heaven-sweet.”

When the printing was done, he checked the pagination one last time, made a backup for Joy’s safe, switched off printer and PC, put dust-covers over both, split the novel between the manuscript boxes, labeled them, placed them in two padded mailers, taped and stapled them shut, addressed them to Cynthia Stephens—sniffing and admiring the wicked cherry odor of the black marking pen—and zipped them into his backpack. Heavy suckers. Happy to be rid of them and on to what lay ahead.

The sky was overcast, but Nemo gleamed about Joydrop at the kitchen window as if his body’s strung beads flared with reflected sun. June sat across from Ward, spreading blackberry jam on a toasted muffin. Sliding the door open onto a perfect unity of three, he made it a unity of four just as perfect, angels inclusive without being exclusive in the slightest. Strong, subtle, adaptive—these words described them. There seemed noticeable growth in their guardians’ depth and strength every time they converged, and Grampa wondered if and when a natural stopping point in angelic sophistication would be reached.

“You just missed my dad, Grampa,” said June, Jeannie beaming down on her with so much love it made him shudder like an inrush of fresh air after confinement. “He drove away two seconds ago.”

Grampa looked about. “Where’s Laura?”

“She got beeped,” said Ward. “Someone named Sarah.”

“Sarah Haskell,” June volunteered.

“Yeah, her baby’s on its way. Nothing urgent, but it could be any time I guess, so Mom went to check her out at the hospital.” Ward popped a final crunch of muffin into his mouth, Timothy benevolent and afloat by his side.

“So that’s Thalia,” Joy offhanded, holding herself in with folded arms; but glimmers of delight escaped from the edges of her smile.

“No,” he said, unshouldering the pack and lowering it lightly to the tile floor, “it’s a couple of cinder blocks and that’s no lie,” and he gathered Joy in for an embrace, passing through Nemo, the gems moving like crystal bullets through his body and out the back, no pain, hints of stung pleasure if anything, and then Joy kissed a cheek and gave him her heartfelt congratulations.

Nora. Esme’s voice was Ted’s own best voice, a goad whose soft prompt he welcomed.

He gave Joy another hug, then excused himself. Nora sat in her chair, of course, where he’d waved to her from the backyard. She seemed to be watching him still, fixed and invisible and perhaps twelve years younger beside the great oak. Joy had dressed her in a breezy short-sleeved cotton frock, lemon yellow, buttoned and belted, breaking below the knees. Knee socks of a matching color enclosed her compact calves, her ankles and feet.

Pulling up a squat stool, he took the hands that lay lifeless in her lap, felt her feeble response, kissed her pale wrinkled knuckles one by one, savoring the ineffable balm of her flesh. How comforting that was, but how much more of a comfort it would be if it were motile. “Hello, love,” he said. “It’s Ted.” Closing his eyes, he ran the tips of her fingers over his face.

Warm, smooth.

Nora.

He set her hands back on her lap and rose forward, a grip on each armrest, to probe into her eyes. Esme moved about him, the intimacy of their connection more apparent than ever. That’s when it happened. Nothing complicated, a simple movement of the eyes. In days past, as Esme had grown closer, he’d noticed—or thought he did—the flicker of Nora’s gaze gathering intent. But now that flicker was gone; instead he saw the slow sure tracking of his angel’s advance on the right, subtle but unmistakable.

Grampa’s excitement bubbled and brimmed. He couldn’t breathe for a moment, then he shouted out for Joy to come. He heard her footsteps swift in the hall—

She thinks Nora’s having a seizure.

—and Joy threw open the door, Ward and June not far behind. And then they came into the room, they and their angels—and Grampa wondered why the idea hadn’t occurred to him before, as he watched the angelic face lift like a layer of animate epidermis off Nora’s face, coming away in waves, its wide-eyed intelligence massaging the muscles of Nora’s flesh into beautifully willed movement. Her chest caught momentarily, as if the white drift of her emerging guardian blocked her nose and throat, but then her breath eased back toward normal.

She turned her head.

Nora turned her head!

It was a subtle flex of the neck, pure Nora, a simple expressive gesture he hadn’t seen in twelve years. Taking in the wisdom and delicacy of her companion, her slow eyes found the figures on the far side of the bed, rose to Esme so tall that Nora’s forehead lines deepened as she scanned upward. Then her gaze dropped into her husband’s eyes.

“Gramma?” Ward managed.

She looked at him and smiled. Her lips parted as if to speak but she caught herself, turned back, said, “Ted,” and he gathered her to him as she tried to rise, soft with her but all-encompassing, as soft as the arms encircling him, as soft as the hands resting lightly on his back.

So calm it surprised him, he confided, “I knew you’d come back.” Her face nestled like a thrush at his chest. She brushed upward with it, his body remembering patterns of movement so that, without thought, he came down to meet her kiss and she was there and their years of loss dropped away like a heavy cloak of sorrow and he felt so elated he thought he must be rising to the ceiling.

When he tried to seat her again, she said, “No. Not here. Outside on the patio.” But first, as he guided her across the bedroom, she was introduced to and gave hugs to Joydrop and an awestruck Ward and to June, who looked upon her like visiting royalty. Then they launched, piecemeal and overlapping—like a storyteller with four mouths, and those not enough to tell the tale—into introductions to their guardians and how they came to manifest themselves and what had been happening the past three days downtown. Joy brought them all mint tea on the patio, standing by the screened door sipping from her glass as he and Ward and June drew up lawn chairs to the webbed divan Nora lay upon and glossed the highlights of twelve lost years.

The kids did most of the talking. Ted was content to marvel at his wife, the catalepsy gone from her as swiftly as it had descended. His eyes moved between Nora and her angel, a pair of reinforcing beloveds between whom there was no contest: here, the open accepting essence of love, the deep-eyed, glowing-eyed seat of her own creativity and the perfect sounding board to his; there, Nora herself, a woman whose forgotten phrases and gestures he found he was falling for anew, so much had passed by unnoticed in their years together. But now he drank her in, every intricacy, every breath and glow, and he felt like a sponge saturated only to realize how parched it is and to thirst for more.

Ward glanced at his watch and said they really ought to be going, asking Gramma if she wanted to come too.

Nora looked to Ted. “I don’t know, Ward. It feels so wonderful just to sit here.”

“Gramma and I are going to pass today I think.”

Ward was mildly astonished. “You’re not coming?”

“Maybe later,” he said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. Gramma’s got to get her strength back. Besides, I have a feeling there’ll be other gatherings on the square. Tell you what. If Gramma feels up to it, maybe we’ll taxi into town later in the day, just for a few minutes.”

That seemed to mollify his grandson, judging from his expression and from Timothy’s renewed zing. He had a more difficult time convincing Joy that it was perfectly proper for her to deliver Thalia to the post office, offering his apologies to Mindy Rutherford who would surely understand, yes it was all right, yes they’d be fine alone, yes please dear Joydrop take the car and go.

He sat beside her, the lawn furniture protesting, and held her tight as the garage door rumbled open and closed and the sound of Joydrop’s car and then of Ward and June talking excitedly along the road dwindled in the distance and faded away.

“Ted?”

“Mmm?”

“Make love to me?”

*****

Reverend William Fleischer sat alone in the darkened sanctuary, centered on the hard stone steps to the altar, staring out over empty pews and down the plush red runner to the narthex doors; above them, the choir loft with its rounded rosette of a stained-glass window. What with the overcast outside, that window—the tall one behind him too with the cross motif—gloomed opaque and inward, reminding him of a picture he’d had as a child, Christ praying apart in Gethsemane, the colors of his robe, of the black night, done in the dark delicacy of clipped and stained butterfly wings.

His sleep had been troubled. But he’d concealed his wakeful state from Marge just as he’d put on a cheery face for Dawn on her dinner visit the night before. He sniffed a laugh, short and bitter, and felt a pained chill shudder through him. Hiding things from his family, from himself, had, it seemed, been for years one of his specialties.

The creature that had uglied out of his body, obscene as an all-over caress, sheeted now dimly before him—tall, gaunt, misty as unraveled fog. He hadn’t dared—not since the town square—to glance directly into the recrimination of its eyes, nor had he attempted to parse its continually moving, silent lips. In the office, he’d tried to work on Sunday’s sermon. But Kathleen Grayson’s cheerful chatter, usually more inspiration than irritant, proved the reverse today, it stood in such terrible contrast to his troubled thoughts. His angel had swayed nearby in condemnation as he tried unsuccessfully to focus on his notes. And then, of course, there was Ken Jefferson, obviously a visitant to yesterday’s gathering as well, to judge from the kind-eyed, roly-poly guardian that hunched over his exegetical researches into the article he was preparing for Biblical Review and from the conspiratorial winks he slipped past Kathleen, not knowing—God he couldn’t, mustn’t, know—the effect those winks had. He’d let a sob slip out, covered it but not fast enough, said he needed some time alone in the sanctuary, and managed to hold his tears inside until the door closed between them and him, crying even so into his sleeve to muffle the sound.

It was so quiet. He was fifty-nine. Had it been his father? A gentle man, joked a lot, ribbed his mother, not at all domineering, not anywhere near insisting his son go into the ministry. He was still alive, a Floridian, loved to fish. What had his angel said to him as he squatted by Harold Porter, just before he skirted around the crowd and fled, just before its voice faded into silence? You don’t have to wait until he’s buried. And he’d known precisely the meaning of that. It had struck him, foundation-deep. It had unlocked deep dungeon doors and freed the self he had long ago partitioned and locked away.

Empty pews, stilled organ, the paraphernalia of faith without one iota of the stuff itself. A dead stage set, a place of delusion, and he, the trained mesmerist, expected week upon week to reinforce the comforting tissue of lies, had come out of his master trance at last. Every last bit of it, the elaborate show of unassailable bedrock belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, had been vaporized in one awful instant in the square. Please his daddy, stifle who he really was, take refuge and solace in the One True God. It had happened too quick, it was too much like having the fuselage stripped away like a banana peel from around you, still hurtling forward, not falling, looking down into the death between you and the ground, a collar of terror about your throat. What could he do? How was he to sustain his wife, who depended on this ministry for food and shelter? Yet how could he continue, knowing his faith had fled—and knowing the rest of it?

The door to the office hinged open, its faint protest exaggerated in the empty sanctuary. Ken Jefferson slipped in, his jovial companion buffeting against him like a fat man squeezing silently through at the same time. William averted his eyes, ashamed of his desires. Ken’s footsteps were silenced by the carpeting, but he fancied, or perhaps it was true, that he could hear the air being displaced as his assistant pastor approached.

“Are you feeling okay, Bill?” They’d agreed early on to use first names when no one else was about, or when the families got together. To William’s nod: “We haven’t had a chance to talk about what happened yesterday.”

“That was something else, wasn’t it?”

“I started to tell Zora but I decided to cool it when she froze up. Her and the kids’ll be there today.” Ken’s knees cracked as he sat down beside him, the slide of pant legs pinched upward, Ken’s delicate black hands making the gesture automatic. Sweat beaded on William’s brow.

“I don’t,” he began, “know how to . . . There are some things we need to . . .” His eyes refused to move from the subtle scar of marble in the bottom step. “This isn’t easy.”

“Take your time.” Dear lord, what a gentle soul Ken was, such kindness informed his simplest phrase.

“First—and this is between the two of us, I haven’t yet decided how or when or if to tell anyone else—but I, well, I appear to have lost my faith. I had it yesterday, or thought I did, in abundance. But then he came along and it collapsed. It wasn’t a thunderbolt or anything; he simply showed up and spoke to me, and I saw at once that my house was built on sand—no, on a dream of sand.”

“Bill, how can you say that?” Earnest, hands clasped between his polyester knees. Mahogany skin stretched like tanned leather over his bones, tight and smooth, the pores a pronounced black where wrist hairs curved out. “There’s no clearer confirmation possible of divine truth than the miracle of God’s angels making themselves known to us. It sheds a whole new light on the teachings; they’re not some metaphor, never have been; they’re real.”

“Yes, I thought I was blowing hot air on Sunday, but I wasn’t. I’m happy for you, Ken. It’s good that you’ve found sustenance in that amazing angel of yours. But what I’ve found in mine,” said William, shaking his head, “is a different kind of food. Bitter fruit. Let’s just say I’m in the state of calm shock you go into when someone you’ve relied upon suddenly vanishes forever. In this case, that someone is me, the person I thought I was, and with it has gone the entire canon of beliefs I’ve lived my life by for more than fifty years.”

“Don’t you think ‘shock’ might be the operative word here? You’ve been a preacher longer than I have. You’ve seen faith tried; you’ve seen it restored. Surely—”

“There’s something else.” The echo came back from the empty church and was gone. So many years he’d spent here, filling this lovely shell of a building with truth boomed, or confided, from the heart; it was like a violin chinned and bowed over time, its substance quietly coming into resonance with the energy that made it sing.

Ken asked him what, and he let the silence envelop them again, finding no words but knowing he had to speak. “I . . . we’ve long been friends and colleagues . . . on an even keel; sure First Methodist has been primarily in my hands, but I’ve long felt, and I’ve told you so, that you and I are equal partners. When you joined us a few years ago, I sensed that your many good qualities—your directness, your caring, your diligence and devotion to the Word of God, your easy eloquence, not put on and not forced like mine sometimes is—would enrich us a hundred fold. And they have. They do.” His head pounded with fever. An odd gesture from his guardian’s filmy fingers tricked his eyes into the being’s face, encouragement of the most despicable sort there. He glanced at Ken, then away. “But since yesterday . . . since the veil dropped from my eyes . . . I find . . . that my . . . attraction to you includes other elements—I’m sorry, I, long ago I agonized over it, at school, I fought with it, I thought I’d won out over the ugliness. But it’s back, and what’s worse, I’m not certain it’s ugly at all, I mean I want so much to hold you and touch you, oh Jesus I’m sorry why am I putting you through this, and here in church, the number of couples who’ve stood right here before me to take their vows, it’s disgusting, I—”

“Bill, now hold on.”

“But I—”

“Now stop. It’s all right. That’s it, cry it out if you need to, I’m here for you, I hear you, Bill.”

The fit of tears caught him. He cried into his right hand, thumb and middle finger hot against his temples. He reached into his back pocket, blew his nose into a Kleenex he found wadded there, put it away. Ken’s phrases soothed like horehound drops in a raw throat, and William wondered for a moment if the beautiful black man might be preparing to confess a mutual passion. He was torn between his need for that to happen and his self-loathing for so defiling a house of worship with his unnatural desires.

“Yesterday, Bill, I would have pulled away from you,” Ken said. “Inside I mean, slight but readable, providing what comfort I could, but you’d’ve seen some of my charity fall away. Old prejudices die hard. Sometimes they only seem to die, blind worms burrowing deep down into us. But since Chubby here appeared and we spent those few hours by the gazebo getting reacquainted, I feel like my heart has been thrown wide. I’ve never felt closer to God or to my fellow man and woman than I do now, with all their faults, all their failings, all the wonders they hold inside. You hurt, Bill, that’s clear. And it hurts me to see you tear yourself up this way. I never thought I’d say this, but I honor what you’ve discovered about yourself, more I gather than you do. I honor those feelings and impulses as valid and true and godly, just as much as those that bind man to woman, and I’m ashamed of myself and my church for denying so long their validity and truth and godliness.” He let a moment of silence enfold them. “Have you told Marge?”

“No.”

“Do you still love her?”

That took him aback. It had never occurred to him to stop adoring his wife. His love for Marge was sacrosanct; this other struck him as satanic, an embroilment, a hidden sewer beneath the sanctified streets of his soul. “Yes, I still love her. More than ever.”

“That’s good, I’m glad.” Ken shifted, angling toward him and gesturing, head bent, like a coach benched one-on-one with a discouraged athlete. “Now here’s what I think you need to do: Call Marge, call Dawn, get them both down here now. Say nothing of this to them, neither about your spiritual nor your sexual struggles. Then we’re all going to the town square to meet up with Zora and the kids. You need, I think, a few more hours for Mister Longface there to gather strength, give you guidance; and you need to accept his guidance, Bill, you really do.”

“But what about—?”

“Let it run its course, see what develops; it’s going to be an amazing day, Bill, I know it. This community is going to turn the world on its ear. But first, you and I get to watch our families bloom right beside us, we get to watch their essential divinity—what drives them—take on shape and color and texture right before our eyes.”

William fretted, wondering what horrors lay cloaked beneath Marge’s skin, beneath Dawn’s. He’d spent just a few moments on the square yesterday, overwhelmed by the billowing of his companion and the kaleidoscope of shapes about him. The vertigo, the trauma, were still echoing, and he hadn’t, contrary to what folks had told him, lost his guardian in leaving the crowd; it had dogged him and driven him to the brink of despair. “I worry about them,” he said.

“Bring them in, Bill,” Ken assured. “Let it be on my shoulders. And don’t worry so damn much. God has got his grip firm around this, I can feel it, and Chubby here says it’s so. Give it an afternoon. Then when the festivities are over, you still want to hack out your problems, you’ve got an ear here. How about it?”

*****

Tuesday night had been hell and most of Wednesday had been little better, endless thrashings in damp sheets, the inescapable brush of feelers under the flesh, his fixation with Sarah’s burst belly. But late afternoon, edging into dusk, Carver turned a corner. They’d both known it, Mindy ever-present despite his verbal abuse, and himself feeling the vermin diminish in numbers and begin to back off. New clean dry sheets had held him tight, his companion blessed him with her golden look, and the night passed by deep and dreamless with healing sleep. Thursday morning he managed a shower and emerged to the sizzle of bacon in the air.

She’d laid clothing out on the made bed. He was glad Mindy wasn’t there so he could be as feeble and stumbly as he liked in his efforts to dress himself. His angel mimed her benevolence, unhearable and knowing that, though she’d lost—he was pleased to observe—none of her luster, solid and golden as a Mayan calendar.

“Good morning!” Mindy said, beaming.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Carver replied, amazed at her simple loveliness, her guardian naked and animate over her preparations, but no distraction, or no more than the lady herself. He pondered it as he entered the breakfast nook, told her so: how integral they seemed, like phantom limbs to wounded soldiers, only they were like phantom hearts or phantom reflections of the spark inside. But they, unlike the deluded soldiers’ neural ghosts, discovered a reality, an extra-dimensionality, hitherto hidden but always there to be tapped into.

“My, you are feeling better, aren’t you?” she’d said, and they sat then, glorying in the food—he took tentative nibbles at everything, Mindy little more—and planning out the day. She had to go to work this morning, she said, to be there when Ted Jameson brought in his manuscript; but a friend had called yesterday, a woman whose name he didn’t recognize, and apparently guardianship had started to take hold of Auroville in a big way—the mayor, the sheriff, a thousand or more citizens; and so she would call him, she promised, as soon as Ted’s book was on its way, and they’d spend the afternoon in the town square at the celebration, charging up their angels and observing the sea change that had overwhelmed Auroville since the afternoon they’d spent in Laura Keeshan’s backyard.

He’d debated calling his son during the quiet morning but held off, thinking that face-to-face would be best and feeling like an infant about to be born, the gathering his birthing room and no fair showing himself beforehand. And Mindy had called as she said she would, and now they heard the festivities underway as they walked along Main, and as the square hove into view, he felt his physical exhaustion and cried out of it, so beautiful was the scene.

“My God in heaven,” said Mindy.

Draw closer. I can hear her, he thought, and then he watched the burnish intensify on her front half, as if the crowd were a source of light, and he realized he and Mindy had stopped walking. Gently he urged her forward, leaving his hand on the small of her back, then growing bolder as he rounded her waist, and she didn’t pull away but flashed him her shy smile and rounded his with her left arm, thumb hooking his belt. Together, guardians gathering strength, they crossed over and moved into the square.

*****

It was neat to have clout.

And clout was what Luke Petrakis had in spades.

Clout meant—if you had the golden touch he had—that you could preempt bigwigs; you could muster an audience of millions on twenty-four hours’ notice, at any hour, day or night; you could keep the subject of your one-hour special under wraps from everyone but yourself, right up until the moment of broadcast. Because you delivered, you were hot, you were to live news what Robin Williams was to stand-up comedy. You had this way about you, people sensed it and played to it; that, and luck, and your own best instincts filled the air-time with compelling drama that drew folks’ goggle-eyed attention to the screen and their ever-loving dollars into the coffers of his sponsors.

If ever there was a time to keep his subject secret, that time was now. He wasn’t convinced Clarence Dietz was telling the truth, by no stretch; but he was convinced old Clarence thought he was telling the truth, and that meant there was something going on in his hometown, something so wonderful or so crazy, it had his hunch-hairs in a hackle, as Archer Haslun, chief engineer in charge on the Atlanta end of the feed, was fond of saying. And when hunch-hairs hackled to the extent they had during Luke’s conversation with Clarence Dietz, he had to go for it. Some time, and it was bound to be soon, he’d stumble and they’d rein him in; only proper. But Luke had a feeling that this was not that time, that whatever was coming down in Auroville was worth putting the Bahamas on hold for a few days.

He flew into Sacramento Metro just before nine in the morning, demanding and of course getting the San Francisco crew he’d worked with before. They greeted him with good-natured grumbles about the hour, Maya Redding at the wheel of the van, Butley and Wexler consigned to the back. Maya probed as she drove, but Luke would only tell her, a grin accentuating the cleft on his chin, that they were headed for downtown Auroville and that they’d hit the air waves, hell or high water, at two, less than five hours from now, he said, checking his Rolex. Yeah, yeah, Maya knew about the hour from the splash of ads on radio and TV, but he’d better keep his eye on the road and navigate for her, she rarely got up here to the hinterlands, and if he expected not to end up interviewing trees and beavers somewhere in the backwoods, old Lucky Luke who liked to cut it close’d better damn well co-pilot her down I-5 and into and out of the maze of highways around Sacramento proper so they were pointed right for Auroville. Luke ribbed her, razzed her, for her San-Fran-provincialism. Coastalites thought there were nothing but farms between The City and Tahoe, nothing but four hours of I-80, and the swelter of the Sacramento Valley, and the cow-town capital city herself. Petrakis, she countered, you’re nothing but a hayseed, for all your fame; your millions ain’t gonna buy you couth, no way, no how, and you could care less. And he laughed at her and agreed and wondered if her orientation had changed at all since the last time he’d hit on her; hard to tell, but he was sure she’d let him know after the shoot, and it wasn’t likely he’d be hurting for women if Maya had no intention of budging from her sexual preference.

The upscale motel they’d been booked into lay to the east of Auroville proper. But Luke had her swing off I-50 and sail up into the trees and narrow defile of Forni Road so he could recapture a few memories on an overglimpse of the Southern Pacific tracks and merge into Main in a way that would get a rise out of Maya Redding, not to mention the protests filtering in from the back of the van, Clive Butley’s Brit obscenities mingling with the equally vivid patois of Denzel Wexler’s street-gang upbringing. Christ, he adored this bunch! Come unannounced into town, cruise the square, no plans to stop, then back onto the highway, hit the motel, just time for a quick shower and a pow-wow before dropping in on Clarence Dietz: That seemed like a reasonable course of action.

Or it did until Maya pulled onto Main, and familiar storefronts and office buildings eased by, and something engaged his attention about the people they passed along the way. Nothing visibly out of kilter, nothing audible, yet a warm glow began to suffuse his belly, Maya felt it too, a glow like lake water lapping and evaporating from sprawled skin while a moored raft rocks. Then City Hall caught Luke’s eye on the left as Main arced right and the town square curved into view. He saw nothing at first, nothing but the thousand or more folks Mister Dietz had promised, a mandolinist at the mike coaxing out a beautiful teardrop melody, the blankets spilling over with picnic food, the milling about that was more like choreography than random movement. But a miasma seemed to float above the crowd, liquid and scarcely there like the eye-film that momentarily coats everything when a contact lens seats itself. They were drifting by. A thin girl, holding her daddy’s hand, turned and waved, and Luke waved back. “Let me out here,” he said, opening the door.

Maya said, “But don’t we need to—?”

“Just for a moment. You guys can circle around a few times or find a place to park. I’ll stay in this vicinity and we’ll be out of here in fifteen tops.” He ignored the protests from the back, sidling between two close-bumpered cars as the crowd-roar took on rhythm and euphony. There was a woman with her back to him, a granny dress, sandals, on the edge of events but not quite part of them. He went up to her. Baby-blond hair fell to her shoulders and she was fingering a leather pouch at her neck with both hands. She sensed him, turned to him, and at the instant she gave her face to him, the glow in Luke’s belly stretched up and down and out to his extremities like soft sticks of butter elongating to fill a mold. Only the mold couldn’t contain it but let it out into the festive air, and it was Clancy, the name came first and then a wash of toddlered memories, his forgotten playmate; and as the egg-yolk gleam of that heartbrim of a face took form, he saw the woman encircled with gems, more like teardrops oozing along implied lines both longitudinal and latitudinal, a foot or more removed from her body and with a body of their own; and the crowd beyond the woman, beyond Clancy’s beaming smile, sprouted like the sudden flush of birds from a brake the most out-and-out astounding gallimaufry of creatures he’d ever seen this side of a dreamscape.

“Aren’t you . . ?” Her eyes caught the van moving away. “You are! You’re Luke Petrakis!”

“Um,” he said, his circuits overloading. Anchors for the soul, that’s what he saw. He felt his body open up, a shut eye whose lids now angled back and whose iris dilated to let in more. Clancy beamed and nodded. Yes, he seemed to say, you’re seeing the beginnings of a healing process, connectedness reestablished. And indeed these folks moved as recovering invalids, strides easy and loose, their feet rooted in but not restrained by the grassy earth, heads up and open to the cloud-patched, sun-bursting sky above, and nearly visible cables of connection between them.

Luke, don’t be rude.

“Right, Clancy. Yes, I’m Luke, and it’s a pleasure,” he said, putting out his hand, then realizing he’d spoken and it had been the most natural thing in the world. “I can’t believe I’m taking this in stride. This is Clancy, by the way. I knew him as a child, but I haven’t a clue how I know I knew him.”

She laughed. “This is Nemo,” she said, and she had to repeat her own name, it was so odd. Her hand tingled in his, and he held it longer than he had to, turning it over and marveling at it and kissing the white bony back of it. “Ooh, that feels nice,” she said.

“Jesus, Petrakis, you don’t waste any time!” Maya crossed the street toward him, Butley and Wexler arrayed behind like a decimated V of geese. He waved them over, have-I-got-a-surprise-for-you in his eyes. “Watch out, boys,” Maya joked. “He’s got that glint again.”

And then they were had, a righteous thing to witness. Denzel started to bolt, but they calmed him and talked him down out of his panic, confirming his visions and theirs, the beauty of them as well as the unsettling strangeness. Luke introduced Joydrop, feeling somehow as if she were an older friend than they. At times, Luke felt so centered, so at home with himself and his colleagues, he grew mildly pleasantly manic and gave them big bear hugs, grinning at their guardians all the while. But as charged with spunk and delight as they all felt, this was, Luke was pleased to find, no lotus-eating bewilderment they’d fallen into, no surrender of Apollo to Dionysus. After a lot of good-natured grumbling and an exacted promise that once they’d hit the motel and conferred with Clarence Dietz, the crew would have a chance to mingle before testing the link to Atlanta, Luke herded them toward the curb.

“You’ll be here?” he asked Joy over his shoulder.

“I ought to be heading home,” she replied. “I can’t say if I’ll be free or not.”

He took her number, scrawling it on the back of his business card. Then he hugged her once quickly, feeling the fierce warmth and surprise there. “Don’t disappear. Don’t do that.”

“I won’t.”

“Let’s go, you guys. We’ve got some errands to run and then we’ve got some history to make!”

*****

Sarah Haskell asked for ice chips and Tom obliged her with a tiny spoonful, cool as mint lip balm with the right amount of crunch and moisture in her mouth. Contractions were holding steady at twenty minutes apart, but that last one, like fists clutching the muscles at the small of her back and tightening upward into her abdomen, had convinced her that events were about to pick up their pace.

You’re doing beautifully, Sarah. Her guardian, fond of shifting shapes, had taken on the face and form of her favorite elementary school teacher, Miss Grondin, the one she’d hugged at the end of third grade, crying, reluctant to leave her.

“What did she say?” Tom asked.

“Said I’m doing beautifully.” It came out breathless as if the sheen of sweat on her face were god-glow and she were the sexiest vamp on the planet. At her request, Tom, angel a bald fat cherub at his back, bent to the stainless steel sink set into the wall and dampened a washcloth with which he wiped her face and neck.

“So is she right?” he asked.

She captured his hand, kissed it, cradled its curved warm back to her chin. “I’m doing fine.” She patted her belly beneath the hospital gown and looked about. “I love this room.”

“Yeah, somebody did something right.”

Subdued lighting, tasteful wallpaper, a wood-framed oval mirror, dark-stained wood everywhere in fact. Were it not for the breakaway bed and the strategically placed closets, tall and thin, that no doubt concealed emergency equipment, she might imagine she were in someone’s home.

Tom’s softened, hasn’t he? Divine observation and true, her angelic words confided so close that Sarah’s ear warmed with fancied breath. Impossible to say, of course, how much of the change she’d seen in him could be credited to the baby’s imminent arrival, how much to the leavening effect of Tom’s guardian. No, that wasn’t so. Sarah had noticed how subdued her husband had been on Monday, coming home unexpectedly at noon to change into a clean suit and return to work. Been in a fight with his dad, he’d said, but something weird happened; and he’d said that in a way that closed off the conversation, not abrupt, but simply done, as if his mind were caught up in the contemplation of a vast and wonderful conundrum. Tuesday evening he’d gone about the house with a secret smile, telling her he was taking the next day off and they were going downtown, no, he wouldn’t say why, she’d know when they got there. And then yesterday morning, they’d arrived at the square, June Lockridge at the mike, and the miracle had happened, and Tom had relaxed into it and filled her in on what had occurred that first day, gawking about in hopes his father would show up, but he never did. And except for that and the near-tragedy perpetrated by Al DeSario (which almost flushed the munchkin out a day early), the next several hours were glorious and golden. Sheer refreshment of the soul for her; and for Tom, as far as she could gather, a lifting of fretful burdens.

But before she could ask for confirmation, her body seized up again, learning its shifting pattern, traveling more swiftly along it this time. He was there beside her, a loving if mostly ineffectual guide to the breathing she sought refuge in during the tightening below. And when it finally eased up, Tom recorded the time on his yellow pad, announcing that her contractions were now sixteen minutes apart. Once more he gave her ice.

Doctor Keeshan entered, Topsy riding behind. “How are we doing?” she asked.

Sarah said fine, and Tom dittoed her and read off the vital stats, and then Sarah had to laugh. “Sorry, Doctor. Every so often it strikes me how odd, and yet how natural, our angels are. And funnier still is how quickly everyone seems to be adapting to them.”

“Yes, it’s been an interesting few days at the clinic and here, I can tell you. Some colleagues and parents-to-be I’m strong enough to bloom myself, but most I can’t. A few others have either been bloomed downtown or have known someone who has. It tickles me to be in a mixed crowd but I like it best when everyone’s in the know and can comment freely. I like Tom’s angel a lot. So cuddly and so wise. And so contrary to expectation!”

“Dumb would have been truer to form, I suppose,” Tom joked.

“No, it’s just that you’ve always been so somber and grown up during appointments. So it’s surprising to find a cherub at the core, and yet it’s absolutely, inevitably right once it’s revealed. Same way with Sarah’s, who, I see, has turned a new side out.”

“My third grade teacher,” said Sarah, feeling proud.

“Beautiful,” said the doctor. Then she examined her, a firm gentle probe, and said she was near six centimeters dilated, that at this rate the baby could be anywhere from forty-five minutes to three or four hours away from birth. “Which means, I guess, that it’s time to let you know what to expect at eight centimeters, once your contractions are one or two minutes apart, because it’s at that point that, shall we say, another presence makes itself known.”

“You mean the baby’s—?”

“Yes but the best part is how its guardian appears!” And she told them, detailing the theme and variations at the three births she’d observed the phenomenon at so far, and Sarah thrilled to it and laughed, and Tom too took his delight, saying, “Thus do medical science and folk wisdom converge,” the put-on tone refreshingly uncharacteristic. But then the muscles bunched at the small of her back and it was roller-coaster time again, Doctor Keeshan’s steady hand on Sarah’s belly, Tom anchoring her to her breathing, and the trio of guardians reminding her of crèche figures bent over a manger.

*****

His first thought was of the treehouse, how splendid it would be to love her there, the sounds and stillness of nature all about. But Nora walked with him down the lawn, the treehouse looming beautifully overhead, and it was not possible without ropes and pulleys and a hot-air balloon basket—she was simply too frail for the ladder. So they returned to the house, to their bed of so many years ago, and he kissed her clothes off, remembering her movements, her sounds, the feel of her hand on his penis, all of it coming back as if years had not intervened. And then he covered her and crushed her and felt her womanhood close about him, clasping and caressing as he moved inside her and gazed his love into her beautiful open sentient eyes and kissed her thin radiant lips. Beside them, spilling off into the air, Esme interlocked with Nora’s guardian, eyes on each other and on them, and it was good and right so to be seen. “Tansy guided me out of it,” Nora said as they lay there after he had come, still joined below and content to stay that way. “I was trapped inside and she appeared and took my hand and led me through the looking glass of my face, if that makes any sense.”

“God bless Tansy,” he said. “And God bless you, dear sweet Nora.” Elbowing up a bit to take most of his weight off her, he kissed her wan cheeks, her temple, an earlobe. Then he eased out of her, Nora protesting wordlessly; but he cuddled beside her, his bare front measuring the length of her body, one arm comfortingly possessing her about the waist. He told her how much he had missed her, how lovely she was, kissing her ear as he whispered these things, her burnt-almond eyes gazing at him from the pillow.

“Reminds me,” she said, “of the lovely time we had at Ken and Eve’s cabin in the Catskills, just the two of us.”

“I’ve lost touch with them, with lots of our friends. We ought to look them up sometime, see if we might go back there again.”

“Yes, let’s,” she said. Then, changing tack: “Ward and June are beautiful.”

“They are. And wait till you see Laura. She’ll be home tonight, so you can . . . but maybe I should call her now.”

Nora stopped him. “Time enough,” she said. But her hand tightened on his arm and he saw something in her eyes he’d seen before and Esme said Be brave and then came the replay of her seizure of fifteen years before, the elderly body repeating the writhings of the middle-aged, the hair whiter, the wrinkles deeper and more numerous—but there was no mistaking the same accursed pattern of movement, no action he could take to root it out. He held her. At her ear, he spoke soothing panicked words, wanting to go call for help, but not wanting to leave her alone. Why had he been so foolish as to send Joydrop away? But there was no time for self-recrimination, no time for thought, just the rising panic, and the need to be there beside her, and the urgent hope that she would weather the storm and that the ambulance would arrive in time and that the doctor chosen to treat her would do so swiftly and competently.

Dark slivers opened in her pupils. He caught an edge of her guardian, then his eyes turned fully to its shift, and the sand seeped out of him. It had been . . . she had been white and soft, but now there was a hard darkness, a neutering, coming from within. From pine to driftwood to unbuffed ebony turned its flesh, a short span and nothing hurried. It was speaking to her, placing a dark hand upon her brow, and Ted wanted to hear it and stop it and watch it all at once. In his arms, Nora lunged for breath, her eyes turning from him to her guardian. She tightened up, a ratchet, a notch. Then the divine creature brought its obsidian lips, its hands, to Nora’s mouth. Lightly, so as to cast doubt upon the contact, it kissed her. And there slid into its hands, as it withdrew, the head and then the body of an infant, riding on Nora’s last exhalation. Ted glimpsed its face before it was swaddled up in dark folds and lifted away, and it was the face fixed in memory from his wife’s scrapbook, the beaming goggle-eyed amazement of her baby head lifting from a gray carpet in some black-and-white room.

I’m taking this well, he thought. Not the last touch and vanishment of Nora’s angel, which seemed as natural as a sunset, but the loss of his beloved. Should be tearing into me with grief, he thought; I ought to be sobbing and carrying on like a bereaved husband.

That will come in time. Esme made no judgments, had no extra solicitude in her eyes. Nora’s head had fallen back against his arm where he cradled it, a heavy bowling ball in a net sack. He lowered her to the pillow, closing her eyes as he smoothed her hair. Naked he knelt next to her, breath just sufficient, her hand cooling between his hands as clouds silently dimmed and undimmed the heat lamp of the sun. Towels, Esme suggested, and he went without question to the hall closet, took down the top towels and some washcloths, laid the towels, three-ply deep, beneath her buttocks down to the backs of her knees, her skin now like marble just below room temperature. The urine sighed out first, a last braid of liquid, its finality fixing him in its twist. Then Nora’s bowels relaxed and that was all right, it was like Laura on the changing table by the back window in their old apartment, three-year-old Laura poised between diapers and potty, willfully choosing to let Daddy wipe her clean and pin her into fresh. Now he dampened a washcloth and wiped his wife, cleaned her up, dropped the towels in a garbage bag, put on old clothes that had been hanging for years in the closet, brought the covers up to just below her shoulders, pale arms outside them and hands in an approximate fold at her waist. He sat there on the bed, exploring the cooling sculpture of her fingers, full of the fact of her death, unaware of time or the minutiae of bird-sound and light-shift.

When Joydrop touched Ted’s arm and he looked over at her face through Nemo’s solicitous glitter and he heard a question come again from her lips, he said, “I don’t know, a while ago.” He nodded at her suggestions; it was not in his power to register them, but he trusted her, and as she lifted the receiver, he left it all to her, went into the hallway and through the TV room and past the kitchen table and out the sliding door, imagining he must be headed for his treehouse but not in the least surprised when he went right past the oak and into the forest. Something waited for him in here, something he’d neglected all his life, a dream deferred. Fresh empty breezes painted the treetops, tossed from one to the next. They waved him onward, Esme towering behind and his disembodied legs drifting him in.

No mind, no matter.

III. Imperfections in a Glass Eye

9. The Rest of the World Takes a Peek

Maya had had time at the motel to phone Joanie, just a few minutes’ worth but enough to tell her she had to get her pretty butt over here, didn’t matter the drive was an ungodly number of hours, the pot o’ gold at the end of this rainbow was worth the trouble. The promised mingle-time had been short but intense, her senses heightened against the richness of each moment, each clustering of Auroville folks she forged into—like the magic weeks in her hetero days when she and a boyfriend had hitched through Britain, every ride its own universe, from the laconic lorry driver rumbling down the spine of Wales to the Dickensian rollick of jovial fat people that welcomed them into their van and dropped them off most reluctantly in Ripon.

But speaking of Brits and vans, here she was, locked away from all that glory, headset hooking her to Atlanta, Clive Butley hunched over the panel and peering into the monitor. Lousy posture, the idiot squinted unnecessarily into his work; she’d castigated him before, to no avail. His guardian curved along his back like a stretched-out Siamese. “Sound check?” he requested of Luke.

Archer Haslun nagged at her ear: “C’mon, Maya. Give me a hint. I won’t tell a soul.”

Joy, joy. Mister Monopoly’s wide white eyes rolled where he hovered, near-bald head and Cupid’s-bow moustache giving him his moniker. Yeah no shit, she thought; men in my ear, men in my face, and now a male companion—sounded like a hired studbunny, “a male companion”—cute though he was. He felt out of place, cooped up in this van. So did she.

As she told Arch to stuff his fucking hint and heard the appreciative chuckles of his co-workers ripple across the line, Luke protested into his handmike, “Clive, will you lay off the sound check? Six is plenty. The sound is golden.” He had an armful of Joydrop Heartline and kissed her a loud smack on the lips to demonstrate his point.

Beautiful woman, Mister Monopoly mused.

“Yeah, she’s okay, I guess,” countered Maya. “Not my type though. Too ditzy, too New Age.” Poor woman had had some problem at home, a little conflicted about being here but she’d done what she could, handled the coroner, left a note for her boss who’d wandered off into the woods.

“Fifteen seconds to logo . . . now. You talking to yourself again, Maya? Don’t lose it on me.”

“Fifteen to logo,” she repeated, and Clive relayed it to Luke. Joy told Luke good luck, then smoothed a lick of his hair and kissed him and broke away out of the monitor. “You’ll find out soon enough, Arch old buddy.”

“Ten . . . five . . . logo . . . now. Ten seconds to live feed.”

“Luke in ten,” she said, counting down the seconds in tandem with Arch Haslun, Clive a hair behind her. Denzel had his camera tight in on Luke now, Clancy cropped out at the right, though if you knew what to look for, you could see part of an arm shifting behind Luke’s left shoulder.

Clive, under her, hunching into the rhythm: “. . . three . . . two . . . one and . . . go.”

“Good afternoon,” Luke said, looking and sounding as strong as she’d ever seen him. “It’s my privilege today to be coming to you from Auroville, California, the small town I grew up in. It’s been fifteen years since I last set foot in Auroville. In most respects, it seems not to have changed all that much. Same schools, same churches, every road a scrapbook of memories in my mind.”

“That’s it, Luke,” said Arch Haslun. “Milk it, draw it out, you beautiful s.o.b.”

“Cool it, Archer,” said Maya, thrilled to be watching Luke Petrakis embark the world on the most amazing journey it would ever take, and not wanting to miss a word.

“But in one respect, in a few short days, this town has undergone a sea change, a marked transformation of so sweeping a nature that it is becoming not simply the best Auroville there could possibly be, but more significantly a forerunner of what I expect the world will be like in, I would venture to guess, a matter of months.”

Maya had seen every one of Luke’s live documentaries and had participated in three now, counting this one, but she had never seen him turn on the charm like he was doing today. What was it, besides the obvious, that made this broadcast different? Positive news. That relaxed, subtle grin. He usually plunged into the fray of tragedy, moving with mike and cameraman through the ravages of disaster, a genuine thread of concern woven into the insightful probes he made, as victim and onlooker alike fell naturally under Luke’s purview. But today it was revelation time, time to give good news to the country and the world. And that, to judge from the look on his face, was a task he warmed to.

“We’ll get to the how of what has happened here a bit later in the broadcast, but now it’s time for the what. I think there’s no easy way of announcing the subject matter of today’s show without seeming to be a madman or a fool, but as Othello once wanted ‘ocular proof,’ so I believe it best to show you straight off one example, my own, of the phenomenon in question.” Here, obviously prearranged, the camera pulled slowly back until Clancy, beaming and waving to beat the band, shared the screen with Luke. “It’s my pleasure to introduce Clancy, my companion in infancy and my guardian angel.”

They were awesome, the two of them. Maya felt a rush of love inside her, a cry of joy. At the same time a tiny laugh escaped her at how comical Clancy looked. And, what was odd, she thought she heard that laugh echoing over her headset. Could shock induce laughter? she wondered.

Um, maybe not. Mister Monopoly looked pensive.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” she said.

“More than beautiful,” said Arch Haslun. “The man’s a fucking genius. It’s Harvey all over again. Oh sweet Jesus, the wonder of television!”

*****

He drifted in through the foliage, finding paths on automatic because he knew them so well, then moving deep in along byways never taken. Esme kept behind but close enough for comfort, not saying a word. The ground felt peculiar under his feet, like remembrance of pine-covered paths. Then he realized he was wearing his canvas shoes, forgotten for ages in their closet, the shoes he’d first used to learn the forest floor.

Old growth back here. Trees taller, closer together; more dense and spreading, the heads that swayed above in a wind that did not fall far enough to lay the lightest hand upon Grampa’s face. The only breeze he felt was generated by his incessant walking. He wondered that he wasn’t yet stooping under angled trunks, or brushing his way through an interweave of thin branches. His steps seemed attuned to open walkways, or else the forest pulled away from him as he walked, not wanting to touch the tainted.

You’re not tainted.

Her words were soft but startling. He feinted in the direction of giving her a look but it was too much effort. How could he not be tainted? Where grief was expected and awaited, there was only selfish relief: Nora was dead and Ted Jameson was free. He thought he’d been free before, a house in the trees, a limitless canvas upon which to paint word pictures that pleased a gratifyingly distant horde of readers, more riches than a man of his simple tastes could ever hope to need. But now the last albatross had slipped from around his neck. Nora was dead, and he felt glad and hated himself for feeling so.

No need for hatred, Ted. “I’m okay, you’re okay,” he muttered, bitter venom catching at his throat. But all he could see was her in the window, a wave he’d thought was a gesture of love as he broached the slope of the lawn, his visits to that room, the touch of a hand to Nora’s face—all of that so deep with longing for her, so deep into the pain of separation. Yet it seemed, after all, to judge from the relief her forward-projected empty window held, to have been no more than an elaborate charade. He despised her, he resented the anchor she had become, and all his reputed insight into the human psyche was shown up as just so much rubbish. He was alone in the world, always had been. Everyone on this sorry planet was alone, walking through illusions of community, but waking far too infrequently to the truth of essential isolation. They all marched, day by empty day, to their graves, and no amount of mindless activity could stave off what lay beyond that final moment.

Above, a bird mocked him. He stopped now to touch a tree trunk, same damned message at his fingertips as there always was. But this time it came through differently. A stiff scrunch of grayish bark buffered the living tree, as his whorled skinpads kept flesh, blood, and bone locked up inside. Delusion of contact. No contact. He brought his other hand up, pressing them treeward as hard as he could, so that ridges of bark dug into his palms. If only he and this tree could pass beyond the buffering, blend bark with skin, allow what lay beneath to slip by and meld, flesh to xylem, blood to sap, phloem to bone. He set his forehead to the tree and at once felt foolish, pulled back, stared at his palms, brushed off black bark-crumbs. One lip of skin had been opened on his left palm. He licked at the trickle of blood, cleaning it. Man’s but a bare, forked animal. Yeah, no shit.

You’d better find a place to sit down.

“Oh? And pray tell, my Esme, why is that?”

It’s on its way.

He stifled a laugh. Speaking in riddles now.

It’s not a riddle, Ted.

“Yeah, you’re so damned solicitous, so bent to do me good. I suppose you must really love me, right?”

I do.

“But maybe your love is no more real than mine was, a lie all the way through. Maybe what seems like a deeply held conviction is just a thin skin of delusion covering, I don’t know, a wish to have me gone so you can fly back to heaven or wherever the fuck you come from, dear sweet Esme, and get on with your life. I bet I’m just as much a weight around your neck as my Nora was about . . . as my Nora was . . .” But his throat had begun to clutch and he had to laugh in self-defense at the feelings beginning to radiate out of him, they were so fast and so numerous and so mercilessly jagged. His hands flailed before his face but Esme guided him to soft ground and he stumbled upon a root, falling but catching himself, and then the raw grief began to wash over him.

*****

“Sarah Haskell’s ready, Doctor,” Nurse Cruz had said. “Coming on quickly for a primigravida. And I heard about those others last night. It must be an epidemic, because I swear this one too was going on and on about the stork before she caught me gawking at her and clammed up.”

And of course Laura had said nothing to Maria Cruz to suggest that she wasn’t the least bit surprised. But when they and Nurse Pyne arrived in the birthing room—Sarah on the cusp of a contraction and fully effaced and dilated—a critical mass of the converted came about, and Laura again was pleased to find that the amazement of the nurses there to assist her in no way diminished the speed and precision of their professional ministrations; Nurse Cruz swore once in Spanish and Nurse Pyne made a roller-coaster groin-drop whoah! but then they rallied. Time enough to explain, to get to know their guardians, later. Now there was a child readying to be born, right occiput posterior from the feel of it, the top of its head engaged at Sarah’s pelvic inlet just inside the cervix.

The contraction ended and she asked Sarah how she was doing. Sarah, her face sweaty and her hair slicked across her forehead, gasped and nodded. Tom Haskell laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder and she gripped it. Her companion angled forward to murmur words of assurance, still in the shape of Sarah’s third-grade teacher but aged into wisdom and cronehood.

Beautiful, Topsy exclaimed, loud enough for a laugh to move through the room. He waved to Tom’s cherub and to Sarah’s wise-eyed woman, and for a moment their guardians triangulated, each somehow looking straight into the eyes of the others. Then they, and their charges after them, glanced toward the ceiling where a black-feathered stork tufted with white circled long, soft, and lazy overhead, like a long-bladed fan that never seemed quite to come to a stop, its dark eyes gleaming goodness, its beak needled through the knot of a white weighted bundle of swaddling, out of the folds of which poked two fists, two tiny feet, and a flat swirl of light hair atop the hint of a head.

Sarah’s next contraction, a beaut, brought them back to the bed. They were coming quicker now, so quick that Sarah scarcely had time to recover her breath before the next one was upon her. Laura suggested an episiotomy but Sarah again refused it with a shake of the head, and soon the bulging of the perineum—Laura massaging its tautness as she coached Sarah to push—gave way to glimpses of the child’s scalp at the apex of each contraction and then, as the baby slowly negotiated the birth canal, visible always and becoming increasingly so.

“Your child’s crowning,” she said. “Can you see it?”

And Sarah, glancing at the mirror angled over Laura’s left shoulder, gasped, “Yes!”

“Time to push, Sarah. Time to push like you’ve never pushed before.”

*****

Archer Haslun, roving like a lean and hungry predator behind his engineers, was elated. Luke’s live displays of reportage always made for riveting TV, but Archer harbored a slight distaste for public probings into private misery, however compassionate Luke managed to make them. Give him instead the kind of documentary that Luke only trotted out once in a blue moon, the kind he’d once referred to as his Emperor-has-no-clothes series. In 1989, there’d been that gathering of UFO devotees, garbed in the tackiest of space gear, at the extravagant and well appointed pool-and-patio expanse of an eccentric, unnamed, and conspicuously absent Hollywood personality. Early ‘91 had seen the earnestness and spurs-out hostility of an Arizona debate—devolving by swift degrees into a verbal cockfight—between the hollow earth contingent and the Flat Earth Society. Luke did not mock, neither openly nor with inflective eyebrow, those he interviewed, but committed completely for that hour to the truth of their delusions, insightfully probing, going deep for the pearls of psychic opalescence lesser reporters had no notion even existed.

But never had Luke tackled a crowd this size, nor one that came across so wholesome in every other respect. And never before had he directly professed to believe the warp of his subjects’ fantasies, a daring gambit and one so far that seemed to be paying off. He’d collared a guy, after that amazing Harveyesque opening, Gregerson, stiff bristle of whitish hair atop a flushed face, cool-blue eyes, owned the ice cream parlor, sixty maybe and a bear, but Marine-trim, Luke calling him Mister Gregerson like he’d probably done when he was a kid: an amazing conversation, partly a mad celebration of non-existent angels, partly a slice of pure American nostalgia for small-town life, and entirely a heart-wrenching and paradoxical snippet of video about Luke Petrakis’ kinship with and love for this man, even as he exposed him to national ridicule.

“You’re putting me on, right?” Maya was saying, her voice an annoyance over Luke’s trained tones. “You must be seeing all four of them, sharp as a bell.”

“No problem, Miss Redding,” Archer said broadly. “We copy. Lucky Luke delivers again.”

“All right then.”

Perky little lezzie. Luke liked his van jockeys to play along on these jaunts. Something to do, he’d said, with keeping his mind totally open and respectful toward his subjects’ psychosis, giving them their due.

Now Luke was moving, the camera catching glimpses of what looked like a courthouse across the way and a gazebo or bandstand in the distance. From blanket to blanket he went, dipping into this family and that, some he’d known, some newcomers since he’d left town. He gave them their time on TV, shared their glee over the angels he and they pretended with uncanny conviction were hovering over and behind and around them, then moved on with a blessing and a wave. Recurrent were the names Ward and June, as also the name of T. E. Jameson, the fantasy writer, and without saying so directly it became clear that these three—and surely Jameson, reputedly a nutcase however brilliant his books, had to be the prime mover—were the instigators of the mass delusion that had seized this town. The children were apparently on site, and if Luke’s meanderings took on any form, as they inevitably did, it was in the unhurried direction of an encounter with them.

Epstein was shaking his head, so Archer went over to him. Hand on shoulder, something wrong? But then he saw Epstein’s face, stun and smile and admiration there, the gleam of gold at his left earlobe. Two thumbs in the air, a slow shake of the head. Fucking awesome. Archer patted the young man’s shoulder and nodded.

Luke had found one of the kids. June. Pretty girl, maybe fourteen. Reminded Archer of a childhood sweetheart he’d had, violinist, kisses like warm buttercups. “So how exactly did all of this start?” Luke asked, after the poor girl introduced her parents and someone named Jeannie who seemed, from the way they gestured, to be standing at the edge of the blanket. Archer, amazed at how suggestible he was, almost rubbed his eyes: He’d thought it astounding, Jimmy Stewart’s mimed conjuration of an invisible rabbit in Harvey, but when you put whole hosts of Elwood P. Dowds on the screen, it was almost terrifying how ready one’s mind was to go along, to slip into their delusion like a hot bath. Someone needs to rescue Luke, he thought.

The girl was speaking. No, it hadn’t started with T. E. Jameson so much as with Ward, his grandson, but then it had taken the three of them coming together to set things off. Archer began to question Luke’s judgment, wondering if through Maya he should nudge him away from this child. It was one thing to allow adults to expose themselves to public mockery, quite another to dwell on a little girl’s foray into lunacy in such a way that her life was bound to be forever dogged by it.

But then there was some commotion in the background, a few pointed fingers and a purposeful drift rightward of those previously seated. An elderly woman in tennis shoes came up to June’s parents and excitedly announced, “Anne, George, it’s the mayor!” Her voice was off-mike but loud enough to spike in under June’s reply so that she finished her sentence early and glanced around.

“Let’s see what’s going on,” Luke said, an easy hand turning June and guiding her, camera following, toward the elderly woman. But her back was already receding, an odd waddle-hop to her steps, no time to linger, I’m late, I’m late, no pocket watch in paw but Archer wouldn’t have been surprised. “Mister Lockridge,” Luke asked June’s father, “what did she say?”

“It was about Mayor Cosgrove and her husband doing something very loving and beautiful. I don’t know.” He clearly wanted to talk to Luke—who wouldn’t?—but he was also clearly drawn by the magnetism of the crowd. He had the most wonderful smile on his face, not vapid but abrim with vitality and good will. “Excuse us,” he said, and he and his family hastened after the elderly woman.

“Let’s follow them, shall we?” Luke asked his viewers rhetorically, as if they had any say in the matter, and as if Lucky Luke had ever failed to pursue a main chance like this one. Some stubborn or lazy folks kept to their spots as he passed them, shouting out their hellos, but the rest of the people appeared, as Luke noted, to be converging on an area near the gazebo. Archer thought he glimpsed a man in the distance, naked. But it happened so fast there was no way to be sure it wasn’t a—

Epstein hit the arm of the engineer beside him. “Did you catch that streaker?” Nope, he hadn’t. Where?

“Maya,” said Archer, as the crowd parted like knifed butter for Luke, “did you see a—?”

“A what, Mister Boss Man?” came her reply, but there were suddenly no words in Archer’s mouth, no thoughts but oh-my-god-no in his head. His eyes stuck to the monitors arrayed before him, most of which were angled in and down upon a blanket, murmurs of delight issuing from the crowd that edged it, and on that blanket, spilling into millions of homes worldwide, a pudgy woman lay atop a sprawled man whose face was covered by the hairy split of her buttocks (my God had he just seen that?) and whose genitals she was doing her best to gag down. “Sweet Jesus,” Luke Petrakis was saying in a voice flooded with feeling, “look at their angels, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!”

Archer’s mind raced, going nowhere, larynx paralyzed. But then the thoughts coalesced. Gotta stop it, I’m chief engineer here, I’m in charge, gotta stop it. A phone rang in the distance, then another, and another. “Epstein,” he heard himself say, then engaged behind it, not recognizing his voice, “kill it, kill the feed, go to a commercial, go to something, anything!”

And then Epstein was fumbling at the controls, clumsy fingers letting one more headbob of filth sneak by before the screens went brain-gray and then a promo for some talk show cut in. Archer couldn’t focus on it. So much verbal and visual noise, none of it mattering much any more. And he had a feeling a few of those incessantly ringing phones were meant for him.

*****

Without Esme to comfort him, he might have suffered less. He might have stifled the pain, denied it, let it in a trickle at a time over weeks. But Esme was sunblock. She buffered him against the worst of it and, in so doing, emboldened him to open himself completely all at once.

He clawed at the earth, the moss green and moist and clotted under his nails. He rose and plunged into growth, pushing back when it rebuffed him, snapping branches from young trees, uprooting them when he could, leaving them as so much kindling behind him. And he bellowed and roared, hurling skyward sustained ululations of protest he would not have imagined a human being capable of a week before. But Esme’s soothing let that happen. That thin layer of acceptance and balm she provided both extended his limits and enraged him further. He longed to transcend his cage of flesh, wrench and bend the bars free, and whicker them outward like tossed daggers until they gashed so deep into whatever Prime Force lay beyond, that It hurt as much as he did. So close did Esme hover, so all-surrounding; yet the disconnectedness wracked him through and through.

He saw it all: the pallid love of his parents, good souls but discomfortable in their bodies; the friends that flickered and died, brief feints at camaraderie, and then memories only; his time with Nora, a rush of love that had settled too soon into ruts, had ushered his precious Laura into the world—but she was grown and gone in a flash, no longer the dear child he hardly remembered, but adolescent and then adult, more distant in some ways from having been his daughter; then Nora’s fall into catalepsy, his retreat into worlds of his own imagining, contact minimized, even his hugs for Joydrop and Ward and June no more than alien gestures that carried and did not carry meaning. He had held his wife once more. He had witnessed the mesh of her angel with his, divinely wept for their intimacy, for the re-animation of her soul. And then, as suddenly as she’d appeared, she was gone, the memory of their hours together fading even now, leaving him bereft.

You’re fine, Ted. Not precisely what Esme said, but close. It was an odd combination of sounds, which honored his suffering even while casually pointing a finger beyond it.

No, I’m not fine, he insisted, again not in words but out of the chaos of sound and fury clouded around him. He wandered lost and tear-stricken through endless brakes and gullies, not sure thereafter when his rage boiled away and the dull ache of emptiness took over, Novocain wearing off and nothing but raw red nerves exposed to the air.

*****

Sarah was surrounded by so much love—Tom superfluous at this point and pretty much out of it with his beautiful sobbing; her companion soothing and cooing on the opposite side; Laura Keeshan, whose professional, personable manner she’d grown to admire and who now sat on a stool intently readying to catch her baby; and the baby itself, a bond so integral and intimate about to be replaced by new bonding, a face, vivid eyes, the strong suck of a mouth. But quite literally above all, Sarah fixed on the drifting lowering laze of the stork, its bundle once opaque now translucent and veering swiftly toward transparent. The bird’s gaze, so glossy and vacant in an actual stork, warmed with love when it met hers—a look that kept Sarah intact during the maelstrom of birth.

Inside the dim mirror, her child’s head emerged. One glistening blue shoulder slipped free, then the other. A nurse reached in with a bulb syringe to suction the mucus from its nose and mouth. “There, there, little one,” the doctor said, gently stroking the baby as she eased it out. “Time to be born. Time to breathe.” And the stork swept in close and dipped down, the fragile veil of gauze about its burden breaking up like parting mist so that the bare white beauty drifted down and melded with Sarah’s baby on its first inhalation. “It’s a girl,” the doctor said.

She wailed. Amy wailed. Sarah couldn’t believe the joy that flooded her as the tiny body was held up between her open thighs, so small in Laura Keeshan’s gloved hands, her blue skin beginning to flush with pink. Dimly she was also aware that her baby’s halting cries, as if borne on a magic breeze, had puffed against the stork and transformed it into a robed old man, a Merlin. She took him in now, a doppelganger in some weird and wonderful way for her baby. He glowed, his head angled forward slightly as if he were listening to the Apgar scores being dictated, the snip of the cord, the rustle of cloth as they swaddled his charge and laid her in her mother’s arms.

Miraculous, Sarah’s angel said, her voice husky with awe.

“Oh, yes,” said Sarah as Amy’s bleared eyes locked on her eyes and her tiny lips O’d around the soft ruddy spike of Sarah’s left nipple, gumming and sucking for milk. The nurses and Doctor Keeshan were busy below, but Sarah took in only the small circle that was Tom leaning in to touch his daughter’s hand, Tom’s cherubic guardian beaming over his shoulder as if it were a cotton billow, Merlin freshly wise at her bedside and nearly touching her companion, and the strange warm wonderful connection taking place between Amy and her, where mouth met nipple.

*****

“Sweet Jesus,” Luke said, “look at their angels, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!” It amazed him. In his pre-broadcast walk through the square with Joydrop, he had noticed of course the patina of blessedness which lay upon those they passed, the sweet resonance every word and deed took on. But as he and Denzel Wexler had been swept along through the crowd, the drain-swirl of companions murmuring excitedly above, Luke had no idea that their presence was capable of sanctifying for public display acts which until now had been confined to the privacy of the bedroom. And yet here it was. Mouthings outlawed in many states, even between consenting spouses, were now revealed in all their splendor—not a lascivious spectacle, nothing that lowered men and women to the level of the beast, and surely no act that, in all its glory, need be limited, at all times and in all places, to private venues. Clancy marveled at its beauty, a warm buzz in his ear; but above all, the canopy formed by the mayor’s and her mate’s angels, gleaming and swirling in perfect ellipsoidal energy exchange, sang its paean unceasing to the miracle of fleshly love. And from the delight on the faces around him, it was apparent that shock and shame and condemnation were swiftly yielding to new perceptions.

“Let’s keep the camera on the loving foursome, but I want to get some reaction from these good people about me. You, ma’am,” he said to an elderly lady in a flowered hat, whose smile broke across the powder lines that etched the downdraw of her mouth, “what do you make of this?”

“Astounding’s all I can say. I want so much to think it’s filthy and an abomination, but Alice here—” thumbing over her bony organdy shoulder at a ravishing raven-haired sylph “—melts my dinosaur notions and makes me soar right through them. It saddens me, what my Ben and I missed out on; but what a joy it is to witness the pleasure shared by these two young people.”

She gabbled on but Luke lost the beginning of it when Clive broke in: “Atlanta’s cut us off, Luke.”

Uh-oh, Clancy commented.

“—why, you can almost feel their happiness in your own bones. It’s exciting, don’t you think?”

Luke’s voice went on though his thoughts were frantic in his head. “Yes, thank you, ma’am. And you are—?”

“Missus. Alma. Pritchard.” An increase in volume, as if his mike were a hearing aid. In the distance, the van door slid open. Maya stepped down and walked over to Joydrop at the edge of the square.

“Thank you, Mrs. Pritchard.”

Don’t lose it, Luke.

“You’re very welcome, I’m sure.”

He glimpsed Denzel at the camera, unaware of anything amiss. There was polite applause to his right. A toddler squatted near one corner of the mayoral blanket, elbows on knees, chin on fisted hands, his attention rapt. “And you sir,” he said, bringing his mike into the cluster of folks beside him, not sure who yet, he never did that, he always knew whom he was addressing before he spoke. He saw it at the end of his hand. The mike had moved. Luke had barely started his question, whatever it was going to be, and the mike had moved away from his face.

“Cut it, Luke,” Clive said. “We’ve got dead air.”

Be of good cheer. This can surely be fixed.

He babbled on, pulling the mike back to his mouth. A few eager subjects peered from the crowd. It was simply a matter of picking the best one, asking the right question, then opening yourself to draw out, with grace and respect, the perfect answer. No problem. Not a talent just anyone possessed. No need to sweat it. So he bobbled once; hey, they’d forgive him the occasional trespass.

A hand rested on his shoulder.

He turned, saw Joydrop’s somber face through the gems of her guardian, embraced her and accepted her embrace all in one gesture, the mike pressed like a black mace against her right thigh. His head was swirling and his body ached with an inexpressible need to cry, but he held fiercely to Joydrop Heartline as if she were his one salvation, aromas of loveliness rushing in to soothe him.

*****

The afternoon was waning. Harold could sense that in a few moments families would begin to pack up their picnic baskets, dump their refuse, rustle up and billow out their blankets for folding, and head for home. Was a shame, the fiasco regarding the Petrakis broadcast—technical glitch, from what he could gather, failed satellite link or some-such—but he hoped enough of their miracle had got through to put Auroville on the map and, more importantly, to set the benighted world on a long overdue course toward truth and enlightenment.

“I love you, Harold.” Her Honor, the mayor, brought her lovely face close up, a half-moon it was so near, one smiling eye darting happily left and right before she came in for the kiss. He breathed her ocean loveliness.

“Love you too, sweets,” he said, one hand resting on her naked hip. He pressed his thumb in, let it go and saw the white-on-red impression flare and vanish. “Someone is the least bit sunburned, I think.”

“I suppose we ought to get dressed.”

“I suppose we ought to have gotten dressed hours ago. But I’m glad we didn’t.” They shared a laugh. He’d been the first to shuck his clothing, with Caroline’s approval, around one. Thea had swiftly followed, no one batting an eye, except it be one of approval. What would’ve been an act of indecency and public exposure a week before seemed, and rightly so, to be perfectly natural. A few folks here and there went along. Carver Haskell and Mindy Rutherford did so, closer to the gazebo in the shade of the tall oak, a proud packed woman and her blissfully happy though still feeble man. A high school kid with a chubby rump and dark bristles on his upper lip took to meandering everywhere in his defiant birthday suit, his angel bemused behind him in downward beam. And then there was the beauteous object of his infatuation, sweet lovely Dawn Fleischer, her all-over tan hinting that the weekend rumors touted by Thea and her friends were true.

Folks had lingered to congratulate and thank them for their act of revelation, a whole host at first, then dribs and drabs as the hours wore on. But always Dawn kept at a distance, caught up with friends or sitting naked with her parents and Ken Jefferson’s family, as fully relaxed about her nudity as could be—though Harold sometimes caught her looking their way. Now she approached, hair cropped close about her head, small pert perfect breasts before her like a dream, a vaguely Polynesian cast to her face. Above her a fleece-faced youth, muscled and woolly, floated. Strung wooden beads, two inches worth, hung from her earlobes.

“Dawn, hello,” offered Thea, the pinch long vanished from her voice. Blooming had been good to her.

“Hello,” Dawn said, kneeling and resting her hands on her thighs. Her rounded buttocks touched the baby-wrinkle of her heels. “Hello, Harold.” She offered him her slim hand, which he took and then released.

Coconuts and pineapple, offered Caroline.

Dawn looked amused and puzzled at him.

“What she means,” he said, “is that while Thea and I were making love and everyone began to crowd in, when Thea finally freed up my nose, all of the aromas that had been temporarily overshadowed came rushing in. It was amazing. I nearly came right then.”

“It’s his sense of smell,” Thea explained.

“Heightened by the blooming. I’ve yet to find anyone else so affected but it sure hit me that way. But as I was lying here, breathing in the sweet smell of mortality, the sweetest flower in the whole bouquet of amazing odors struck me like a concentration of coconuts and pineapple, though I couldn’t see who it was. Off in that direction though, and clearly it was you.”

Dawn’s guardian chimed in. Nice compliment. The man is smitten, I’d say.

Dawn gave him a wry take. “Jeez, let’s be frank, why don’t we?” To Harold: “Did you hear that?”

Harold laughed, Thea joining in. “Yes and it’s true. Boy, I never thought I’d ever feel right about mentioning it to you, let alone with Thea sitting beside me—not that I think for one moment it could ever be reciprocated.”

Thea laid her hand on Dawn’s arm, then released it, a confidence about to be imparted. “That’s just like Harold to wimp out, he’s always been so shy and yielding. I must say I amaze myself. There’s been all this clutter forever in my head and I never knew it was there. Private nudity, private sex, cleaving only to one partner. Where did such bizarre notions of human behavior come from?”

Dawn allowed as how the ban against nudity certainly made no sense to her, indeed that America as a whole was clothing-obsessed. Her happiest childhood memory, or one of them anyway, had been running naked through sprinklers when she was two or three. “At school, I had a boyfriend who took me around to the hot springs in southern Oregon. I was shy at first but it was mostly couples and old folks surprisingly, lots of transplanted Europeans whose ways at beaches are a lot freer than ours.” As she spoke, making eye contact with Thea much of the time, Harold eased back, head propped on one hand, and drank in the delicacy of her body. It was not a sexual once-over, though desire hummed always in the background. No, it was much more a case of realizing how beautifully unique Dawn was, and how much of a total statement of personality the undraped body became, and how deeply into talking—one might say severed—heads the culture was. As lovely as he’d thought Dawn previous to this moment, more lovely by half she’d become in taking off her clothes—her delicate hands gesturing as her torso shifted and her breasts agreed, the unfettered expanse of skin from knees up thighs to hips, the soft combed look of Dawn’s private hair skirling up like chestnut flames from the nexus where her thighs met the tan plane of her belly. All of these, integral, of a piece, increased his love for her. “So anyway, when I returned to Auroville to teach, I discovered a number of like-minded souls in Placer County, regular folks—you’d recognize quite a few of them, Thea—and I wondered if maybe you might want to join us Saturday for a potluck and hot-tubbing at a local home.”

Habit began to speak. “I don’t know—”

“Oh, Harold. Of course we would.”

“You know,” he said, feeling a surge of confidence, “Thea’s right. We’re honored at your offer and we accept. Just let us know when and where and we’ll be there.”

She rose, smiling. “I’ll call you tomorrow with the details.” The pink of her vulva showed for a moment, not a tease, just a fact. There were no private parts at all, none, no special fetish attached to this body part or that but rather he desired Dawn entirely and was content not to have that desire fulfilled.

Thea’s angel, the stunning image of her younger self, whispered one word, but it was loud enough for Harold and Dawn to hear: Luscious.

“I ought to be embarrassed,” admitted Thea, “but I’m not. You’re a beautiful woman, Dawn.”

Dawn shrugged and laughed, the child she’d once been breaking through. Then she shook and held Harold’s hand, did the same to Thea, holding her eyes perhaps a fraction longer than she did his. She waved and walked away, the perfect and unaffected sway of her hips stirring him.

Good God, he though he heard Caroline say, but then he realized the voice had been Thea’s.

10. Bubbleburst

Sex and cigarettes drove Mike DeSario upstairs with Patti Singer.

Or rather the hope of sex, fast fading from the look she gave him and the shake of his steel angel’s head; and, once she’d made known her attraction to Len Frome and he’d surprised himself by accepting it, the need for a smoke in lieu of sexual release. El Cid bugged the shit out of him for lighting up, until Mike finally said, “So help me kick the habit” and his silver surfer replied, I will. For the moment, it stilled a craving; that was all that mattered.

Patti plumped some pillows on the bed and settled in, her face to the dead TV screen. Why doesn’t she turn the thing on, he wondered, and then remembered his rule, silly in retrospect, that nobody controlled his TV but him. He grabbed the remote and fired it up.

The DeSario family had been a part of the vanguard of those leaving the town square, a spontaneous exodus that began just after four. It’d been weird having this famous TV guy come over to their blanket round about one, knowing him and Mom had hung out together in high school. He had gripped Mike’s hand, looking him solidly in the eye as if to say, You could have been my son. Poor bozo really had nothing to say. He just babbled at Mom mostly for a while until his guardian said She’s older and that spun everyone into an embarrassed round of joking which lifted the famed Luke Petrakis off his knees and onward. He’d avoided them during the broadcast, though he veered close several times in the opening minutes, and in the car, after Dad splurged for ice cream, it had been a topic of conversation whether or not the camera—before the uplink had been lost—might have caught them in the background.

Mike flipped through the trash, painted hands showing Zircon necklaces, Oprah’s grin, Phil’s frown under closing credits. He checked the CNN channels, wondering as always why they needed two, but the wooden-faced man and the lady with the notable lips were into a few moments of fluff and isn’t-this-precious before the top of the hour and gave no sign that miracles were afoot in California. Resuming his remote hurtle—liquid roping in slo-mo over ice, shrinking real estate agents, McLaughlin grilling someone off-camera like a cobra in love with its own hood, the Movie Classics guy in mid-pause, Go-see-Cal, Paula Poundstone slouched on a stool, a piece on the Interstate Killer’s latest grizzly massacre in Nebraska, then back around to single digits.

Theme music, upbeat but significant, trumpeted over a familiar logo, the announcer had his say, and then fade-in on the aging pretty-boy. “Good evening,” he said, while a superimposed square upright bled in to show a smiling Luke Petrakis in torso above his name. “Famed CNN personality Luke Petrakis dealt his career a major blow this afternoon in Auroville, California, when his on-the-spot coverage of a town gone mad devolved into an X-rated display of raunch and depravity. Judith Kinkaid has our report.”

That’s not it, hold on. The deep voice of his angel underscored the weak protest of Patti’s, and Patti herself chimed in, “Wait a minute, what—?”

Mike shushed them.

“CNN officials are tight-lipped about the details of today’s media outrage.” The reporter, a blonde whose top button was buttoned, wore her disapproval in the shadowed curves between her cheeks and mouth. “It all began as an exploration of mass psychosis—with Petrakis adopting, as he has done before, his subjects’ skew on reality—but it quickly became something else entirely.”

“Mikey,” Patti whined, “what is she saying?”

“Shut it!” said Mike.

Kinder, Michael.

“You too, buddy.” He took a deep drag, let it out, a nervous blink to one eye. On the tube, the blond reporter spoke over a picture of Luke, muted, talking and gesturing behind him as the camera pulled back to reveal the bright clothing and beaming face of his angel, the same creature who had floated behind him on his visit to their blanket. Yet clearly from the blonde’s comments, she couldn’t see him; and now that Mike considered it, there was something different about the angel’s image on video, almost as if he were more solid than a video image ought to be, a buzz in his brain when Mike focused on him.

Cut to June Lockridge. Luke talking with her in the foreground, her family seated on the blanket. A ripple of joy swept through the crowd. There were angels everywhere and again Mike focused on them, on the differences between them and their charges, and on the unsettling brain-buzz. It had come upon him so suddenly, so completely, in Ward’s backyard. It had been self-evident. Overwhelmingly real. But now he wondered. And now the camera moved at Luke’s back, parting the way. He heard someone shout, “It’s the mayor!” and he remembered that moment, him and Patti able to glimpse the miracle from where they stood, bobbing over shoulders, the beauty of Mayor Cosgrove and Harold Porter loving one another, the soft glow and toplike hum of their conjoined angels canopied above. But on-screen, the crowd gave and the angels were there, but beneath them a Clorox-blue blur concealed ninety-five percent of their love, the feet and lower legs exposed, the mayor’s hair and forehead moving in and out of the air above the blur. Where he had felt elation and triumph this afternoon, he now felt shame only, deep and burning behind his face. “The broadcast of course was live and uncensored, as Petrakis enthused about love and angels. The FCC is contemplating punitive action against the network. Neither Luke Petrakis, nor novelist T. E. Jameson, who is rumored to be somehow connected with the events in Auroville, could be reached for comment. In Atlanta, I’m Judith Kinkaid.”

A sharp inrush of air from the bed was followed by a staccato series of sobs. “What are they saying, Mikey?” Patti’s breasts shuddered beneath her blouse. Her frail angel shimmered like heat over blacktop as she wiped her eyes with one bent wrist.

Steady. There was a metallic hollowness to El Cid’s voice where before there had been a solid ingot of steel.

Mike stopped. He stared directly at his silver angel where it hovered between him and Patti. It had seemed so vividly real for two days, but now he entertained doubts: Its edges were hazy; its eyes flickered with veiled panic, as if it had been found out; its skin was more like cheap gray plastic than conquistador armor, now that Mike cast a critical eye on it.

Only believe. Far away and dwindling.

Mike dragged deep, huffed it out through his nose. A glare glossed his eye. “Yeah man, sure. I believe in you like I believe in Tinkerbelle and the Tooth Fairy.”

“Don’t say that, Mikey. Please?” A high whine from Patti on the bed, trembling like the frail little twit she was; nice piece, all out of control when he rammed it into her, but a damned nuisance sometimes. He liked to wrestle with Patti between fucks, rib-tickle her until she pleaded for mercy. But he’d never hit her; just made the gesture, gave her the look. But anger billowed now in his head and in his heart, anger toward Keeshan and June Lockridge and the old fart that lived in the tree. They’d made him lose face in public; they’d made him cry and go all goody-goody and confess the family sins in public; they’d manipulated his girl to the point where she’d rejected him in favor of Len Frome. And, good Christ, he’d gone along with that, a shuffle and a nod for the boss-man.

Later for that shit. He stubbed the butt out in the ashtray on his desk, his annoyance at the bitch on the bed blooming without bound, that wet face a focus, magnetic to his hand. The rage, the hand, the will to inflict. There were highlights glinting the air, like the memory of pond water sparkling in the sun; but Mike, intent on something else entirely, strode through them oblivious.

*****

Calvin DeSario, couched between his parents in front of the set, felt increasingly trapped there. His father’s huge left arm pressed on his shoulders along the couch back as he leaned in and gestured with the remote, leaping from channel to channel and swearing his disgust. Calvin’s mom sat to his left, her face pale, not a peep out of her, but he saw that the beautiful hands which had graced her neck, causing comment today in the square, were gone now. Tears welled in his eyes. Without the blessing of those angelic hands, his mother seemed stripped of grace, older, fallen into sadness and resignation.

All lies, Cal, what they’re saying. The bubble lady fizzed and fumed overhead. He knew she was right. But no rightness in her and no firmness in his faith in her could bring back those hands nor make meringue-white and audible his father’s hazy and inaudible guardian, which dissipated into sorrow even as Calvin watched.

“I don’t believe this.” The remote recoiled again to bring up yet another news report, caught at its beginning, some vapid-faced newscaster boxed beside a folksy Harvard sociology prof, eyebrows bristling, tie askew, who ticked off cases of mass delusion down through the ages. “Jesus Christ, we’ve been had. Fucking nutcase and his two kids hoodwinked us. Then your old high school sweetheart, big-boy-motherfucker Luke Petrakis, breezed into town and put Auroville on the map, right up there next to Jonestown and Salem and the Maharishi’s Oregon paradise.”

“That bozo doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” It slipped out, and his father rounded on him, couch cushions giving as he got into Calvin’s face. His skin felt like a prison suit suddenly and there was too much angry flesh in the air. The eyes, harsher than ever, harsh as a desolate nightscape, drilled into him.

“Sure, wise guy.” The remote tapped him once lightly on the forehead, a cold insubstantial bar whose vibrations decayed on his skull. “Him and the others, they’ve talked to folks like us after the fact, they’ve seen this kind of thing before. Right, they’re just blowing smoke.”

Go along with him.

“And speaking of smoke, that’s just what my so-called guardian angel went up in as soon as the shockwave hit me, as soon as I let myself see through him. We’ve got a Jim Jones in our midst, three of them, and we’re going to have to do something about it.” His dad nudged the remote into his mom’s arm. “You’re okay now Kitty, aren’t you? Can’t see any hands any more, can you?” His mom said no, and it scraped at Calvin’s throat. “Look at that,” said his dad, pointing toward Petrakis and Mister Gregerson. “Empty air and a couple of deluded fools. American public’s going to eat this up. This town will be crawling with reporters by morning, bet my bottom dollar, and when they get here, you two and Mike are going to be straightened out, right? You clear in the head, son?”

Tell him yes.

“I . . . I don’t know, I—”

“Damned fucking kid.” His left hand gripped Calvin’s hair tight at the base of the skull and he freed his right hand for violence by tossing the remote in his wife’s lap. “I shoulda never let you play with that sick little wacko, filling your head with his invisible-companion shit. You grew out of that once, Cal, remember? It’s crap. Grade-A number-one bullshit. Jameson and those two brats stuck it to this town so quick, we didn’t see it coming. All of us went under; we bought it. I’m not making like I’m holier-than-thou. But, son, it’s time to snap out of it, time to smell the bacon.” His father thumbed upward to where his angel waved caution. “I don’t see no stinking fizzy lady and you don’t either, am I right?”

A muffled squabble came shattering down from above: Patti’s terror. Mike’s belligerence. It shocked Calvin only in contrast to the harmony that had softened their home since Tuesday. His father didn’t bat an eyelash.

“Am I right?” The fist tightened at his hair. The voice went low.

From the TV: “Odd? Yes. But just how odd remains to be seen, as the story unfolds in the days ahead.”

Agree, Calvin. Tell him he’s right.

Calvin nodded. “You’re . . . you’re right, Dad.”

His father mirrored the nod, and smiled, and did not release the root-yank of hair he held. “Kitty, turn that crap off and leave the room.” His dad looked only at him. “Calvin and I have something we need to thrash out.” His mother’s trembling hand rose and flicked off the TV. More anger descended from upstairs, clear now, bone harrowing.

He knows.

Yeah, no kidding. “No, really, Dad.” His voice was laced with desperation. “She’s gone.”

“It’s not that easy, son.” His father’s raised hand flexed and a black pilot-light flared in his eyes. Calvin winced to see it, not simply because he had basked for two days in a gentler light, the loss of which was bad enough, but because what he now saw burning in his father’s glare was far meaner and nastier than anything he’d seen before. “I know you right down to the spine, Calvin James DeSario, and the terrible certainty is growing in me that the only way to—”

“—Daddy, please don’t—”

“—the only way to free you from your delusions is to beat it way the fuck out of you so hard and so mercilessly it won’t be able to find its way back.” He’d never seen a glee so ruthless overtake the old man as he worked himself up to meting out punishment.

Be strong, Calvin. Cling to your core.

Yes, I will, he thought; I will, I will. And he kept repeating that phrase, blow after blow, long past the time it had any meaning, denying his guardian, learning through his pain to fake conviction at a depth that would fool his father into believing him, growing soul-wise in his denial and glad to see, through puffed lids, that she effervesced with the best of them, hardy and proud and fizzy with love and affection for him.

*****

It was a little spooky, despite the afternoon light’s only having begun to wane, for her and Ward to be alone in the house, knowing that his gramma had died and been taken away not so many hours before. Joydrop, they guessed, was with Luke Petrakis. Grampa was still off somewhere in the woods, though there was nothing to say he wouldn’t show up at any moment and June wondered nervously what comfort she could offer when that happened.

You’ll manage. Appropriate words will come.

They lay belly-down on the floor, too close to the TV (but then no grown-ups were there to remind them), digging into a huge bowl of popcorn and puzzling over the coverage they were watching. Timothy’s facial tints bled gradually through a cycle of patchwork Picasso-esque Gertrude-Stein brilliances as he floated laterally in a wide easy circle around Ward’s side of the room. Jeannie, as was her wont, quiesced cross-legged near June’s left shoulder, concerned with the adult negativity flowing out of the screen.

“I don’t get it,” Ward said. “There you are and next to you is Jeannie as vivid as she can be, and right behind Mister Petrakis I see Clancy looking like a fat leprechaun who’s swallowed a cat.”

“Yes, I see him too. Look, he just finger-waggled at the camera. And winked.” Her TV self was busy talking, a weird young lady she had a hard time recognizing.

“I saw that too, so we’ve got to be seeing real stuff and not make-believe. So how come Dan Rather and the rest can’t see it?” He popped a few kernels into his mouth.

“Dunno.” June shrugged. “Maybe we’re all hypnotized like they’re saying.” She gave Ward oogly-boogly gestures into the eyes and shared his laughter. “Or maybe it’s the reverse and they’re the ones who are hypnotized, and only if you see your own angel does some real thing in the mind switch on so you can witness in a sort of four-dimensional way what’s really truly on the tape.”

Ward shook his head. “Emulsion’s emulsion.”

“Well, pardon me, Mister Scientist.”

“You’re pardoned.”

“Or should I say Mister Flawed Scientist. Emulsion’s used for film and photographs, not videotape.”

“Same difference. Can’t squeeze blood from a stone.”

“You can if it’s a bloodstone.”

“A what?”

“Heliotrope.”

The phone rang. Ward leaped up to get it and bounded over her. She watched the blue blur hiding Mayor Cosgrove and her husband and, above them, the incredible light-show of mingled angels. Remembering the total sense of delight that had seized them all, June grew angry at the blindness of these commentators and their so-called experts in human psychology. Who were they to judge, who hadn’t shared the privilege of witnessing it, who hadn’t seen for themselves the totality of what there was to see?

“It’s for you. Your mom and dad.” Ward looked pale and sounded queasy. Timothy wore his uh-oh look.

Rounding into the kitchen, she took the receiver and brought it under her hair to her left ear. “Hello?” she said, looking quizzically at Ward.

“Young lady, you listen and listen good. Your father and I want you out of that house right now. For the past half hour, our phone’s been ringing off the hook. You’ve got some music to face here, and you’re going to face it. We won’t let them browbeat you but we’re not about to shut them out either.”

“Mom, who—?”

“Reporters, that’s who. You had to go and give your full name on that disgusting tape. Now they—(George, get that, will you?)—Now they’ve found our number and—(What? No, invite him in, give him some iced tea, tell him she’ll be here soon, answer all his questions.)—You’re going to hustle your butt home, little lady, no backtalk. You tell that Svengali Ted Jameson to drive you home. No, you wait right there, in front of the house, nobody with you. Your father will come get you; you gather your things right now and get out of that house this instant.”

Her mother sounded pruned and harsh.

She’s lost her angel.

Yes. June felt drained. Her legs began to shake and she had to steady herself against the counter.

“What is it?” Ward asked, obscuring her mom’s words.

“Shouldn’t be more than ten—JUNE LOCKRIDGE, YOU KEEP THAT LITTLE BASTARD AWAY FROM YOU, YOU HEAR ME?” A wrench to her heart, her mother suddenly off the deep end. She’d never heard such terror there, such an enveloping sense of threat.

“Yes, mom. Goodbye.” June hung up fast, not waiting for the receiver to do it but breaking the connection with her right hand. Then she came into Ward’s arms and hugged him fiercely, dissolving in tears at the look in Jeannie’s eyes.

*****

The eyes of Carver’s guardian gleamed like doubloons as he listened to Sarah on the phone describe the birth of her baby. She amused him, his golden angel, who’d gained strength and a voice downtown today. More strength than he himself was feeling. Fatigue still dogged him, though it was much less pronounced than the day before.

“Dad, you’ve got to come see her. She’s amazing.”

“I don’t know, I—”

“And her angel is a delight. Listen, I watched those news broadcasts, turned them right off. Nobody’s going to tell me I’m imagining things. Tom got caught up in their lies, came in with a lid over his fuming, and I saw it was less wearing to keep quiet. Bunch of other folks here too whose faith was still too new. Really sad to see.”

Don’t be a fool. Go.

“Do you think Tom—?”

“He wants you here, Dad. He just doesn’t know it yet is all. I caught snippets of his arguments with his angel before he gave the poor thing up, and I know they talked it over.”

“I’m pretty tired from the day’s events.”

“Tomorrow morning then. Early.”

Say yes.

He did. Still ambivalent. Told Mindy so, lying next to him in her bed, her guardian mirroring her nakedness in the air above.

“You’ll be fine, just like your Goldie says,” assured Mindy, her hair gleaming like red dusk against the pillow. “Now lie back down and cuddle with me. I like the way you do things to me, and I love to watch Goldie mix it up with Angelina here above us like egg white and yolk all running deliriously together.”

He lay down and faced her, head propped up like hers was, and drew her close so that the split-apart world came together along the mystical jointure of their bodies. Her fingers teased along his hip, turned to light nails.

“Ouch!” He drew back slightly.

“Sorry.”

“I guess there’s shade and then there’s shade.”

“You want more aloe vera on that burn?”

“Remember what happened last time you asked that.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “My hand strayed a little. Just might stray again.”

“Something strange is happening on TV,” he said.

“Ask me if I care.” Her hand caressed his neck, her lush lips coaxed open his mouth and played there long and slow until they came away with an exaggerated smack.

Divinity.

“No fooling,” he said, happily gasping for breath. Mindy laid a leg along his thigh, pressing against his tumescence. “I could sure use a drink.”

Suddenly serious: “Don’t say that, not even joking, okay? You don’t need that.”

“Yes, dear.”

She smiled. “Don’t you ‘yes, dear’ me, sweetheart. I ain’t your momma and I ain’t your boss, but your lover is what I am, and I like it fine. You want something to drink, you’ve got two choices. One’s the glass of water sitting right there on your nightstand.”

“What’s the other?”

Sweet Jesus, I think I know. Goldie and Angelina had begun to shimmer and swim together above them, a canopy of divinity and sanctioned lust.

Mindy reached down along her belly, then brought her liquid to his lips and coated them, chased the tantalizing taste with another kiss, deeper and longer than the last, until she turned him on his back and came down around him to the hilt, and above them their conjoined angels began to sizzle and spark all over again.

*****

For Luke the worst of it was watching Joydrop’s pure angel vanish gem by gem. They’d sat there dumbfounded in Luke’s motel room, feeling the effects of the TV barrage, the crew sprawled on one bed, Joydrop soothing his brow on the other. Clancy pleaded, Don’t believe them, believe in me, but he began—as the collegial ridicule flooded across the airwaves and Luke’s insides twisted toward nausea—to sound more and more like the tail-end of a beautiful dream struggling for survival. “I need to be alone,” he’d said, then, taking Joy’s hand, “not you,” as the others went off to one of the other rooms. Soon after, when they could no longer be sure what they saw above the blotch covering the mayor and her spouse (or in one case the cubist patchwork they were turned into)—a flashback of fireflies, static on the tape, or just misfiring brain cells—he’d rushed for the john, closed the door in time, collapsed and unlidded the commode and let it out all in one movement, spitting, feeling the second wave seize him, Clancy pale above him, tenacious little bugger, he’d give him that, shouting to Joy that he was okay, no, don’t come in. He’d rinsed his mouth, brushed his teeth, the shame of it coming in waves and making it hard to stand up sometimes, his translucent nemesis pleading soundlessly in the mirror. And then Luke had ventured out and fallen into Joy’s embrace and, to the incessant keen and drone of the TV, saw each perfect bead of Nemo—last shreds of Clancy reflected as an illusion of anguish—dwindle and evaporate, as Joydrop sobbed into his shoulder.

That had torn at his heart. It had angered him just enough to grab her hand and find the others and haul them out to the van to replay the tapes they’d made, sure that they’d captured the solid reality of angelic presences on film, that it had to be the uplink or Atlanta’s equipment. But there was nothing. Just a jackass with a mike, going about interviewing good decent people who saw the emperor dressed in finery. When the flurry began and the rush to the mayor’s blanket, Luke—embarrassed as if by youthful indiscretions suddenly come back to haunt him—told Maya to turn it off. “But I still see it, guys,” she’d said. “I still see my angel, damn it, and all the rest.” Seek help, he’d told her, and then he’d dismissed the three of them, thanking them and apologizing and pleading on their friendship that they keep a low profile in the days ahead.

And now, with the TV a gray blank silent open eye and with Joydrop by his side, he finally let the call from CNN headquarters through. He had waved away Maya’s headset on the town square and instructed Clive Butley to cut off all communication with Atlanta, while they had a chance, there and on the way back to the motel—they and their illusory angels—to discuss what the outside world’s blindness and deafness meant. And then they had tuned in and met again and again the shock of recognition, radical takes on what they’d delivered to the world by people whose perceptions they respected, as sobering as a cold shower. And Luke’s mind had cleared and the euphoria had hissed out of him as he woke and woke and woke, knife in hand, over the stabbed corpse of a child, a dark blind alley strewn with garbage, rivulets of rain running dead fingers through his hair and dripping from his nose. His fingers felt alien now as Joy handed him the receiver and he brought it to his ear.

“Thiz Luke,” he said, drunk with lassitude.

“Hold on a second, please,” a woman’s voice said, the faintest hint of Southern honey there. “Jay-Cee, I’ve got him,” very faint, bad job of covering the phone, “should I transfer him?” Indistinct male voice followed by a rustle of cloth and then, “Luke, is that you?” Jerry Cowan, loud as ever. Thank God. Could have been Ken Czerny or Mister Obnoxious Asshole himself, Frank Braiterman. Could easily have sicced some tail-chewer on him, chomp him up and spit him out, have him for dogmeat. Cowan was a good sign, and if, as he fully expected, they were about to axe him, they at least had chosen a gentle woodsman to do it.

“Yeah, Jerry,” Luke replied. “It’s the boy wonder.”

Cowan chuckled. “Just as well you pulled the plug on us for a few hours, Luke. Let reason prevail. Couple of the higher-ups, they got their briefs bunched up where the sun don’t shine and they’re only just now tugging them out of their butts and changing into clean. For a good while, the big man himself was ready to fly out and throttle you with his bare hands. He gave Arch Haslun hell on wheels, that’s for damn sure.”

“Give it to me straight, Jerry. Am I fired?” He had a hand to his forehead, Joy behind him on the bed rubbing his shoulders, nicely countering the stress he felt.

“Not for the moment. No, not exactly. We’re afraid this story’s got legs like Puss-in-Boots. Hard to say how it’ll play out. From the calls we’ve been fending off, it looks like you’ll make the covers of Time and Newsweek again though I expect ‘A Morrow for the Nineties’ is not how they intend to blurb you this time. Sixty Minutes’ll try to get to you. Maybe Barbara Walters, so you can properly atone. Barbara’s good for that.”

“So it all depends.”

“Right, the next week holds the cards. The FCC backs off, our sponsors’ ruffled feathers unruffle, the American public gets to vent and vilify all they want. Then, after it crests and some new outrage knocks you off page one, we see who’s got egg on their face, you, us; we discover then whether you’ve made sufficient amends to ride this one out or whether a parting of the ways is in order.”

“I see. I guess that makes sense.” He couldn’t tell whether Cowan was being candid, but for the moment he felt too battered inside to probe for a closer approximation to the truth. “Meantime, what’s the game plan? Do I pick up my vacation where I left off? Lie low for a while?”

“Nope. We considered it. After the firing talk died down and we started talking strategy, the Bahamas came up. Consensus was it’d look too much like hiding. Too easy to enflame the passions further: Buxom beauties by the pool, you in shades sipping umbrella drinks, some Hawaiian shirt suggesting unbuttoned decadence against your hairy chest. No, we decided to assign you to something safer—assuming, of course, you’re willing to play the game.”

Right. What choice did he have? “Sure, okay.”

“Good.” Cowan switched gears. “We have you booked on a flight out of Sacramento at eight tonight on United. Gets into Kennedy just shy of dawn. Give yourself a day to recoup, then we have you teamed up with Michael Smeds, one of our producers, Saturday morning at the UN.”

“The UN? But what—?”

“It gives you cachet, Luke, dignity; it wraps you in the mantle of international diplomacy—we figured some of that aura would rub off. Besides, it gives you sanctuary for most of the day, you stay in the General Assembly and see what documentary ideas arise, the news-hounds are kept outside baying at the moon.”

“Jerry, the General Assembly doesn’t convene until a month from now, and besides—”

“Whatever. The Security Council. The Trusteeship Council. The fucking Hammarskjöld Library.”

“But the UN’s a graveyard for news, has been for—”

“No live stuff, though. Most likely never again, so you’ll need to adjust your thinking on that. You’ll need to lower your sights a bit, assuming you’re still working for the network once this dies down.”

“Jerry, come on, you can’t stick me in the UN. The public will see right through that. That’s nothing like my usual . . . my area of expertise.”

“Doesn’t matter. People see through things and they still believe them. The dumbshow still resonates. Smeds will be bringing along by the way, I forget to mention it, a psychiatrist, one of New York’s finest—we’re of course keeping it quiet and he’s agreed to—”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Now, Luke, you’re not obliged to use him, but if you want him, he’s there. And if you don’t, why just send him on his way, no hard feelings. But we weren’t sure of your mental state and we figured you might find it useful.”

Luke took the pad of motel paper from the nightstand. “Just give me the flight details, Jerry.”

“It wasn’t my idea, Luke, but what could it hurt, you talking to someone about this angel stuff?”

“United when?”

Cowan told him. He jotted it down and hung up, sweat on his brow though it hadn’t been nearly the disaster he’d steeled himself for.

“So?” Joydrop said.

Beautiful lady, her eyes filled with concern for him and he hadn’t done a thing to deserve such love. He held her close. “They’re hiding me in plain sight. Putting a brave face on it until they see how it plays. The best I could hope for, I suppose. I don’t know. I’ve got a bit of sorting out to do, I think.”

Her hands clutched against his back spoke volumes.

“No, not about us. Never think that.” Luke stroked her hair. “Look, come with me, help me through this. No, that’s asking too much, I realize that.”

No, she protested, it wasn’t asking too much, but she needed to stay with Ted Jameson, needed to see him through the funeral of his wife and the fallout from the events of the past week. Yes, she would call every evening but only if he agreed to call her every morning, and yes, she would ask her employer and close friend at the earliest possible moment for a few weeks off to be with him wherever he was.

They did not make love. Luke’s mind was too full of confusion for that, his fall from grace so sudden that he needed simple orientation. And that’s what Joydrop, just holding him, provided. When they finally parted for good and all—in an odd dance of release and embrace, goodbyes and renewed hugs at sporadic intervals across the parking lot to her car—it felt as if their intimacy had gone to depths he’d never before encountered and, moreover, that it would surely linger and sustain him in the days ahead.

*****

In the forest, Grampa wandered bewildered and spent, Esme laconic and watchful behind him. He let the will of the woods turn him this way and that, feeling the ache in his legs dwindle to a dull throb. For a time unmeasured, he sat with his back to a towering oak tree and stared at green and yellow nothing, a veil of long shadows yielding to cloaked layers of dusk and evening and night. At some point he rose and walked, but it seemed as though no such transition from sitting to walking had taken place at all, and indeed smoothness seemed to be not of this world—each jagged scene of dark unsettled foliage buttressed abruptly against the last and jerked onward to the next.

But gradually time regained a semblance of continuity and the darkness unshrouded itself layer by layer until in the distance, flaring between the black upright toothpicks of the trees as he walked, a glimmer of fire caught at the hem of the forest and softened and spread. He headed that way, toward the elusive light, no hurry in his walk and no hurry in the way it peeled away the universal blackness to restore the grays and browns of bark and the multitudinous shades of blue-green above and below.

Thinning. She passed through riots of choked foliage on his right as if it weren’t there.

“Mm,” he ventured, his first acknowledgment, unwilled though it was, of Esme’s occasional remarks. He’d needed, he’d used, the claustrophobic huddle of night, the clutch of blackened greenery at his body, as bleak notions jerked and churned within. But now, shrugging off the muchness of night, he suffered the emptiness and regret of dawn to work their slow fingers into him. Fatigue laid one palm across the cased walnut of his brain, another beneath the aching soles of his feet, and attempted penetratingly to press them together. Hunger, a surprise guest, nagged at his belly.

You’ve grown used to food, Ted. Used to sleep.

“Sixty-five’s sixty-five no matter how—” He let the thought fall away. A vehicle glinted through the trees, a pickup truck, parked at the outer edge of an orchard. His feet carried him onward, aware now of the crackle of twigs and the raw fresh smell of dawn in the air. A stepladder, the old wooden kind, creaked under the weight of some man wearing white, a figure grounded against marching ranks of apple trees as Grampa’s aching limbs moved him forward out of the enveloping surround of the woods. Not a man: Head of cropped white curls, a woman, white-sleeved arms raised to prune, wood-handled shears, a celery snap and the clack of honed blades in metal kiss, the cut branch falling past her overalls and work boots to swish and settle against the earth.

Grampa came closer. He breathed the aroma of apples, saw the golden fruit plumped above and around the laboring woman. Slicing through the truck, Esme hovered beside the ladder, her huge head about even with the pruner’s and her fascination with the woman plain. The shearing stopped, a shift to the white head like a bird alert; she brought her arms down, rested the shears, craned about, took him in as she might a stray rabbit, registering neither surprise nor alarm. “‘Morning,” she said, loud and hearty, then peered this way and that, looking perhaps for evidence as to how he’d crept up on her without her knowing. “What’d you do? Come out of the woods?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he attempted. Then he cleared his throat and said louder, “Yes I did,” as if it were a major achievement but not one he wanted to claim overmuch credit for.

Leaving the shears dangled in balance on a strut, she climbed down, hunched against a fall and moving like a fat white mole working its way backward through a tight tunnel of earth. She peeled off a cotton workglove and held out her hand. “Callie Severance,” she proclaimed, seizing his half-raised hand and dominating the shake, a master of her universe, welcoming him to partake in it. Pushing sixty, he guessed, a plain woman, compact, mannish in manner but not as a pose. Her face was squinty, pleasantly so, and puffed with age. She peered at him. “You don’t look so hot, you don’t mind my saying so. Care to rest yourself under this tree? I’ve earned a break anyway.”

Take her offer.

“All right,” he said to Esme.

“Good,” said Callie. “Settle in over there and I’ll get us a treat.” She came back from the truck with a big squat thermos and two bright red plastic cups. A mass of ice cubes sloshed in the thermos as she walked and jammed against its spout as she poured. “Taste this,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”

He tasted. Cold, sweet, bubbled, wonderful. Again he drank; better than before. “It’s um . . . it’s great. Apple wine?”

“No,” long, drawn-out, in mock-contempt for his lack of savvy. “Nothing to do with apples. It’s fresh well-water, pumped an hour ago.” Settling beside him, Callie glugged a couple of swallows, then squinched the last in her mouth from cheek to cheek like an eight-year-old and audibly gulped it down. “The ice is frozen Perrier.”

“It’s heaven.”

“Doesn’t take much, does it?”

“You must be very happy.”

She shrugged. “I get by.” Took another drink. “You need any help? You want me to call someone?”

Grampa’s mind refused to focus. “No. I don’t think so,” he said at last, then realized he’d neglected to give his name. “I’m Ted.”

“Ted Jameson.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you might be. Saw your picture in Time a few years back. Haven’t read your books though.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I’m outdoors much of the time, in the orchard or at the stand. Let a hefty biography or history book lull me to sleep nights, that’s my preference. You’re pretty far afield, aren’t you? Don’t you live in Auroville?”

“Just north of town.” He brushed an ant off the skin of a fallen apple in the grass beside him. “I wonder if I might eat this apple?”

“Be my guest,” she said, concern in her voice. “Have you had any sleep?”

He rubbed the apple on his shirtfront. Looking up at Esme, he asked, “Have I had any sleep?”

None to speak of, Ted.

“None to speak of.”

Callie looked at him oddly as the cool hard surface of the apple rotated in to part his lips and he took his first bite. Pure pulped sunlight and the gradual tang of regret filled his mouth. “So ah . . . what brings you to this neck of the woods, Ted?” she asked.

He swallowed, looked at her, a whole human being with wounds showing in her face. There was no call to offer an innocuous lie. “Yesterday my wife died.”

Her face changed, not retreating but instead allowing the easy comradeship of strangers to blossom into friendly solicitude. “Oh, Ted, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I watched her guardian angel turn dark and beautiful and spirit her soul away,” he said, the apple senseless in his hand and the words jumbling out. “It happened so fast and all I could do was watch. She’d sat motionless at her window for years, and I’d come in and be with her, but not nearly enough; I was avoiding her; I loved her and I could not bear to stay with her. So I had someone, a caregiver, look after her and I climbed up into my work, and I missed it: the sustained responsibility, the burden. She had so much to teach, but I only skimmed the cream, minutes every day, and then gone. And then the angels bloomed, and Nora returned, and we made love, but her heart simply gave out and Tansy turned dark—Tansy was Nora’s angel—and kissed the infant out of her lips, it came right out on her last breath, a pale baby wrapped in soft black wings, and they drifted away. Simple and beautiful and terrifying.”

Easy, Ted. In a look, Esme eased the frantic animal out of him. But even so, he stared at the ground, a rightfully condemned prisoner.

Callie came closer, on her knees now beside him. Her hand covered his hand, gripping it tight. He looked up at her and was surprised to find her face a mass of tears. A tendril of care went out from him. “What is it?” he said, sensing something deeper than a response to his woes.

Releasing his hand and taking out a bandanna, Callie dried her tears and wiped her nose. “It’s nothing,” she said, a wry smile and a twist of the head trying to make light of it.

Grampa set the apple down and turned to her. “Tell me, Callie. Sharing goes both ways.”

A dismissive wave. “I . . . I had a friend once. A good many years. Seemed solid. In fact she and I bought this place together. Well mostly it was my money but she pitched in a reasonable amount from the refurbishing and resale of classic cars, more money in that than you might think. She uh . . . when she left, she gave me the keys to our Studebaker, said she never wanted to see it or me again. I don’t know the year or model—that stuff never stays in my head—but it’s a perfect car and every Sunday I tool around in it and relive the good times and wallow in regret for the bad, how I neglected her, took her for granted, sidestepped about our differences until I could no longer recognize them. And then I drive it back into the barn.” Callie lay open to him, a little girl in the body of a white-haired woman; she slumped as if boneless, her chin resting on the back of one kneed hand.

“When did she leave?”

“Funny you should ask.” She laughed bitterly. “She left exactly two years ago today. August twenty-seventh, a Tuesday morning, the day after her fiftieth birthday.”

“You know what you ought to do, Callie?”

“What?”

“Get rid of that car.” Grampa wondered if he might be overstepping, but Esme pointed to a flicker in Callie’s eye and gave him assurance. “Sell it to some enthusiast for scads of money and buy your own car.”

“Friend Ted, you may be right. In fact, if you’ll join me in a glass of water, I’ll drink to that.”

He laughed and said he would and they both drank to that. And they commiserated, one with the other, for the next hour or so, confessing their sins and granting each other absolution and forgiveness over water and an apple and a box of stone-ground wheat crackers. Grampa did not hold back about the angels, and his new friend appeared to take them in stride, though it was impossible to tell what credence, if any, she gave them. Nor did it matter, since all her kind caring was focused—as his, obversely—on how he had been affected by what he described.

When at last he rose to trek back home, Callie would have none of it, but insisted on driving him. She knew a back road, made long ago by God-knows-whom and forgotten, which took them jouncing and buffeting over slow twists of packed earth, so narrow in spots that both windows of the pickup brushed past a carwash of evergreens and it seemed as if they might be trapped in foliage. But for the most part it was clear and plenty wide enough, and Grampa had the odd sensation, peering out the passenger window at the woods to his right, that he was watching his dreamscape of the night before lit from a different angle. Exactly so, Ted, Esme commented where she floated by the front fender, and not long after, she pointed up into an oddly familiar stretch of trees indeed. “Here,” he said. “You’re sure,” she said. And they parted with an embrace and an exchange of phone numbers, the throb tearing at his legs as he made for the rise and Esme confirmed the edge of terra cognita they’d both been sure of already, home not twenty minutes distant along well-trodden paths, and Callie not driving off until she was certain, or as certain as she could be, that he knew where he was going.

11. Auroville Fallen

Reverend Fleischer had prayed much of the night. Or rather he had lain awake in the ruins of his life, asking the Lord’s guidance as his wife snored in oblivion beside him. Thank God he had not said anything to her about Ken Jefferson and the proclivities that had troubled him since Wednesday but troubled him no more. But he had attended the debauched festivities in the town square, had allowed the tall devil veiled in angelskin into his heart, and he had aided and abetted the demonic possession of his wife and daughter. Moreover—and how this could have come to pass he had no idea—he had taken in stride his daughter’s parading her nakedness in public, had even gone boasting from blanket to blanket, shamelessly proud of her body’s svelte beauty, reciting whole verses of the Song of Songs. And he had shouldered his way to the front ranks of those who watched and reveled in the mayor’s public fornication, his vision so mired in wickedness that even now, awakened once more to God’s clear light, his memory glowed with the gloss of spiritual beauty the vile act had taken on. He, his congregation’s beacon of righteousness, had misguided them, had let them and God down, had been seen to condone and applaud the work of Satan.

Kathleen Grayson, the bubbly older woman who managed the office, had been at the square. He worried about her soul, and about how she would judge him. But when he saw her car in the parking lot, reliably there, and her drawn face looking up at him like a misbehaved child waiting for punishment, he knew she’d watched the TV reports and been awakened—and, more important, that she was concerned far more with the state of her own soul than with his, which was only as it should be. They prayed together, just the two of them in the emptiness of the sanctuary, and he gave her the forgiveness she begged; and she, after a bout of fluster that he should even ask it, forgave him as well. And then, not two minutes after they stepped back into the office, the phone call had come. A lone reporter, a soft-spoken man, requested most respectfully an interview, not a major moment, just a sit-down in the office, to get his views on what was happening in Auroville; and he’d agreed. And the reporter, when he appeared with his cameraman, had smiled and said the office wasn’t bright enough, would the Reverend Fleischer mind if they did the interview in front of his lovely church in the fresh morning air?

And he agreed (against his better judgment, but then he’d stopped listening to that) and on the steps, they had barely begun when new vans drove up like ants to honey and instead of one mike, which was bad enough, a black-spoked fan of them were pointing into his face. Their questions threw him at first, they came so fast and impolite, but he soon felt their rhythm like the rain of God; they pattered against him and shaped the truth and washed it out of him, no quarter with sin, no holding back. Yes, he had been on the town square twice, God help him; and yes, the Devil in pleasing shapes had mocked him and his family.

“Is it true, sir, that your daughter stripped herself naked and walked about and you did nothing to stop her?”

“How dare you ask such a thing?” He flushed and his grip on the Bible tightened. The questioner had the lean look of a hungry wolf, that self-serving, atheistic sheen of indifference to the suffering of others he’d seen on so many newscasters’ faces.

“Wouldn’t you agree that it suggests how profound the mass deception went, that a Methodist minister would allow his flesh and blood to—?”

“My family is off limits. Next question.”

Another face, a woman: “Reverend Fleischer, from all indications Mayor Cosgrove has long been respected in this city for her political acumen, her love of community, and her quiet dignity. How do you explain the mayor’s bizarre behavior yesterday in the town square?”

“You’d have to ask the mayor that, as I have no doubt you will. I have known Thea Cosgrove and her husband for years, and you will not find more upstanding citizens than they. I am filled with shame and compassion for them—and for all the good people of Auroville unwittingly caught up in the Devil’s mischief. And I am filled to the brim with heavenly wrath toward those few who have perpetrated this outrage.”

“And that would be—?”

“I will not name names. You already know the names.” The fury boiled in him, righteous fury against those whom Satan had chosen as his instruments. He wished it weren’t so: Hate the sin and forgive the sinner. But there was a time for forgiveness and a time for condemnation. “If you will indulge me, this is what God has to say about sorcery of the sort we have suffered under.” He’d found the verse the night before, pondered and prayed over it. He turned now to the red ribbon which marked it. “‘But there was a certain man,’ Acts 8, verses 9 to 11, ‘a certain man called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries.’” He repeated the last phrase slowly and deliberately, leaning into the black bristle of mikes.

“Are you accusing T. E. Jameson of witchcraft?” The questioner mocked with incredulity.

“The passage speaks for itself.”

“But, sir, this is the twentieth century!”

Another voice: “Are you suggesting Mister Jameson’s fiction has primed this community, and perhaps the nation as a whole, for shared lapses into delusion?”

Yet another: “What about the children?”

“Yes,” the mocker again, “what about Ward Keeshan and June Lockridge? Are they witches too? People are saying the children have played a far greater role than Jameson in this affair.”

He was momentarily at a loss. Though he’d heard that Ted Jameson had been downtown several times this week, the writer hadn’t come at all yesterday nor had he been in the town square Wednesday at the moment Bill Fleischer’s gaunt fiend had billowed out, the mayor’s words crisp, clipped, and bright in the air. Ward and June had been sitting on the stage, but that day he had not heard them say a thing. “I . . . I don’t know the mechanism, but I sorely suspect he has corrupted these children in some way, bending them to his will.”

“Sir, do you have any idea how ridiculous the city of Auroville appears to the rest of the world?”

“All I can say in response to that is, thank God the insanity has stopped here. Spread the word, good people, spread light and truth. Inoculate the world against the wiles of the Devil, because if it can happen in a decent God-fearing town like Auroville, it can happen anywhere.”

*****

Ward felt boxed in. He had all the clubhouse windows open, the door too, but still he felt confined, penned up against the coming slaughter.

June had been snatched from him, her father glaring at his house—unable to see Ward behind the drawn curtain but surely sensing him—as he yanked June into the Camaro and sped away. Grampa had not yet returned from his walk in the woods. And poor Joydrop, burdened with the death of Gramma and the disappearance of Grampa, as well as her enforced separation from Luke Petrakis, had been awakened at six by the first rude reporters phoning and was in the house now, two hours later, patiently repeating to every caller, at phone or door, that neither T. E. Jameson nor his grandson was available for questions. He really felt for her, though he wished she’d rip the phone cord out of the wall like they did in movies. The jangle, incessant and distant from here, like tiers of phones ringing under a PBS pledge drive, had to be driving Joydrop nuts.

She gave up her belief in Nemo.

“Nemo, Nemo, Nemo. When are you going to stop?”

I’m in mourning.

“Tell me about it.” Ward was fed up with Timothy’s paste-white face and his slick black hair and the variants on gloom in his outfits. Not to mention his stasis in the air: no swirls, no sweeps, and as morbidly affixed to one spot as the jangle of phone noise from the house; it felt as if he were in danger of wearing that patch of air out.

I need to husband my strength. This is a far more serious situation, Ward, than I think you’ve been willing to admit.

“Surely,” Ward replied, “common sense is bound to win out. It’s a minor setback. Listen, Timothy, I still have you; June still has Jeannie. Didn’t Mister Gregerson call last night to assure us that his angel was still around?”

The man protesteth too much.

“You think his faith was crumbling?”

Likely. I’d bet today’s batch of ice cream will have more than its share of bittersweet chocolate shavings.

“No way is TV going to rob people of their senses.”

Already has.

“A temporary thing. We have no idea how widespread. And even if a vast majority lose touch with their angels, they’re bound, once the smoke clears, to poke their heads out of their shells again.” An image of glistening snail horns extending from stretched slime-gray heads, blindly waving as they suctioned forward, came to him. “They’ll see their guardians again. And they’ll come out and tell the world.”

Not so easy, once consciously denied.

Ward, finding no answer, fell silent. He was afraid it was true. In the so-called natural course of events, the world weaned kids unthinkingly away from belief. It was such a deep-seated process, in fact, and occurred so early in a child’s development, that invisible companions were considered a rarity and not the universal phenomenon Grampa had suggested over dinner a few days before.

More phone janglings and the sound of a truck coming up the road. Ward missed his grampa. And he missed Esme towering joyously beside him. Mostly he bought into Joy’s notion that Grampa had found some friend to stay overnight with, that he was “a grown man” who could see to his needs and who, in his distraction, had simply forgotten to call. But part of him was genuinely worried. Part of him wanted to venture off into the woods right now, Timothy sleuthing alongside him, not waiting to launch a rescue effort until Joydrop felt it was time to call the sheriff.

Restless Ward. His tones were funereal.

“You bet.” The clubhouse was a matchbox, a child’s room, yes a place of refuge but also a place he’d outgrown in the past week. He’d had validation of his weirdness on a grand scale, public exaltation; and he’d become intimate with June, the precious love of his life. Now these were in serious jeopardy and all he could think to do was ride the situation out, hoping that when the smoke cleared the world would right itself again.

Call June.

“I can’t. Her parents.”

Worst they could do is hang up.

“What if there’s a reporter in the house and he makes me answer questions, kinda backs me into a corner?”

Wimpola! Timothy drew a face of exasperation. Use Grampa’s phone.

“I could, couldn’t I?” But then he’d have to get up off this bed, actually move. The air seemed so heavy, his limbs so listless, the torpor bone-deep.

And you wonder why I’m decked out in black!

“Oh, all right.” He groaned audibly as he shifted up off his elbows and came to a sitting position, pointlettes of pinging light dancing before his eyes. First tiny step in a hundred steps.

My, my, the centipede counts its legs!

“I’ll get there, don’t rush me!” And eventually Ward reached the door and then the rope ladder and his grampa’s never-locked treehouse. But what lethargy dragged at him as he went and with what trepidation he finally lifted the phone to his ear and dialed.

*****

June was devastated. She had always delighted in her father’s antic side, the elaborate soliloquies he’d launch into at the dinner table. Wednesday evening, with Ward in the empty chair near the window, he’d outdone himself over pork chops, his pastel companion playing straight-man in an extended bit about how dearly he loved his family, heights of exaggeration both overbroad and absolutely heartfelt, a staggering testament to her father’s burgeoning joy. But now, sitting with her parents in the deathwatch stillness of the living room, it felt as if her dad’s angel, having fled too quickly and too close, had sheared away his antic facade and exposed a cold hard layer of sheetrock she had never known before.

Be strong, June. Her angel made up the fourth, hovering above the carpet diagonally opposite June, who, carefully averting her eyes from Jeannie, felt penned now by her parents into the vertex of the L-shaped couch in the TV room. Her mother’s striated face hung in anguish over the clutch of her hands, off to June’s left. Her father, quietly haranguing her from the right, looked unnatural out of his suit and tie on a weekday.

“Listen, your mother and I apologize for shouting at you while that reporter was here,” he was saying. “But we were right to cut the interview short when it became clear you were still under Jameson’s spell and were about to dig yourself deeper.” She hadn’t liked the gum-chewing guppy-faced reporter, who smelled like piled grass clippings and whose lidded eyes concealed strangeness, but his questions had relieved for a while the twist of tension she had felt since being picked up at Ward’s, the dual parental stress wrenching at her gut. “I promise you we’re going to break that man, for all his ill-won fame and fortune. You don’t appreciate that now, I suppose. Possibly you think we’re being too harsh. But we’ve been where you are now; he got to all of us—the man’s an evil genius—but we pulled back in time. You’ve got to cultivate flexibility, resilience, a healthy skepticism. Your mother and I know how tempting it can be when you’re young to go for the easy fix, not to appreciate all the nuances, the hidden corners. Is any of this getting through?”

She saw the fear and anger in him, feeling it push at her face like a hot insistent hand. The phone rang.

We can get through this together. Her angel’s voice carried less assurance, faintly wavery like a radio signal threatening to break up.

“I . . . I don’t know what to do,” June said.

“I’ll get it,” her mother said. She cut between June and Jeannie, knifing across the room’s surface tension and giving her daughter, whether intentionally or not, a space to gather breath. Her father shifted, easing off, but she knew it was nowhere near over; he planned to chisel at her faith, to wheedle and wheel like a squeamish kid trying to peel off a Band-Aid one micro-inch at a time.

They’ll give. Eventually they’ll lapse into sadness and look at one another and send you to your room.

More tomorrow, June thought.

Yes, more tomorrow; but you will have kept the center and that’s enough to win the war—maybe even enough to win back the seeds of your parent’s belief as well.

But her mother’s voice rose sharply from the kitchen. It seared across June’s ears. “No, you may not speak with June. Not now, not ever! How dare you call . . ? Now listen to me, little man: You don’t know what ‘sorry’ is; not yet you don’t, you and your grampa. But that’s about to change in a big way. We’re coming after you, all the decent people you turned into laughingstocks, and you’ll get a lesson in ‘sorry’ you’ll never forget.” The words jumbled out, more frantic and unhinged with every passing moment. Her father bounded up, crossing the room faster than June had ever seen him move and ripping the phone out of his wife’s hand, hugging her protectively to him as he bellowed into it. “YOU HEARD HER, YOU LITTLE SHIT! YOU COME NEAR JUNE AGAIN, YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT HER HARD, I’LL COME OVER THERE AND TEAR YOU APART!” He slammed down the phone.

Brace yourself.

June didn’t require any warning and she knew Jeannie understood that. It was more in the way of an uh-oh that builds swiftly inside as the tide too quickly turns. Her mother, all reserve gone, came stumbling across the room in a wounded-deer hobble. Her face streaming with tears yet hotly defiant like the face of a frustrated six-year-old fumbling over a puzzle beyond her capacity to solve, she collapsed against June on the couch, grabbing at her hand with a strength that frightened her and pressing it to her chest, pleading and simultaneously demanding that June come to her senses. Her father’s upset, surging in swiftly like a backup assault team, lent its cacophonous counterpoint, loud, red, angry, in-her-face so close she could smell his breath, how dare she upset her mother so, denying his own upset or compressing it to fuel the spew of invective he now blistered her ears with. It was too much. She had thought herself besieged before, but that, painful as it was, had been a casual grilling contrasted with the searing blowtorch blasts she now did her best to endure. She’d never seen them like this—people of quiet reserve turned inside out—yet they were her mom and dad, and the ties ran direct to the bone, numerous and strong and so tempting to yield to, patterns of thought she had unconsciously adopted growing up, these voices, the core beneath them hitherto glimpsed but now exposed in all its siren glory. It would be so easy to—

Hold to the truth, June. Hold to your own truth.

Yes, she would. She shook her head, trying to clear it, both hands covering her face, then away: a flash of Jeannie’s drawn loving look; the carnal proximity of her parents, the barbs, the pleas, the threats and promises; and inside, the tight nausea of resistance and the words battling for preeminence. June extricated herself from between them, feeling audacious for daring to do so, an easy slither to make, yet a first-ever denial of their power to position her where they would. “I need to be alone for a while,” she blurted, surprised at how tight her throat felt. She rounded out of the L of the couch, continuing the curve into the hallway, past the low CD shelves buttressed against the couch back.

“George?” Her mother, pleading.

“Come back here, young lady,” he said, a startle in his voice. “We’re not finished with you.” He was pushing to his feet, ready to go after her.

June had intended her room, but the vestibule came up on her right, the front door resting open against the wall and the screen door’s silver mesh laden with golden light. And her father was moving now. And she sensed, as sure as she knew the contours of her own face, that if she gave up this one chance, she would lose everything.

Yes, her companion whispered where she floated beside her. Then with more urgency: Go. Find Ward.

She angled sharply right, off the carpet, picking up speed, cream tiles slapping underfoot, hitting unerringly the latch and spilling the door open, a sproingy leftward protest from its spring as the welcome mat and the unswept concrete passed by underfoot. Fresh air breezed past her face, congratulatory, applauding her daring, the knots of parental strife easing even now in her belly. Her father shouted something from the house, but surprise was still hers and she jackrabbited across the lawn and shot along the sidewalk, Jeannie urging her on. When, glancing over her shoulder, she saw her father, distant, calling out to her, June zagged into the empty street, gained the facing sidewalk, and cut across the shared yard space between two houses to attain Sacramento Street behind.

Be cagey. You’ve got some notoriety now.

I will, June thought; back streets, no predictable byways, no place near downtown or the business district, nowhere my father or the police will think to look. And yet she had to get to Ward quickly. She had to hold him and talk to him, to comfort him and be comforted. But as she moved, the thought nagged at her—despite her angel’s attempts to soothe—that events might be moving too fast for them, that danger might overtake Ward and his grampa before she could reach them and that she might never ever see her boyfriend again.

*****

Harold Porter, passing an open jar of marmalade under his nose and blocking out the noise outside, recalled with what abruptness his wife had reverted the day before.

One moment Thea had been idly diddling his spent cock on the couch, her legs playfully entwined with his as they waited for the news to hit the airwaves, their companions woozy and happy above them. The next, as the wry sarcasm of the fat-lipped announcer led into the blue-blurred clip of him and Thea enjoying one another, Harold saw her angel disappear—not on the screen but above them then—like the pointillistic dispersement of a gas. He felt her teasing hand drain of tease and die on the vine and then withdraw, and, looking away from the screen, took in the horror and shock planed across her face. He’d been about to express his incredulity at the newsman’s blindness, one usually so percipient and one Thea especially trusted for an unbiased look at the world. Instead, he stammered as she untangled her legs, shrinking back and staring down at her nakedness and up into what was clearly, for her, empty air. “What? Why are we . . ?” she’d said, lost. “Harold?”

Other channels? Caroline had rallied quicker than he did. He caught her urgency.

“Poor man’s having an off day. Let’s go with one of the networks.” But wherever he remoted, the story was the same—more sarcasm, more abuse, Thea’s name and title bled below the blur, above which emerged the top of her bobbing head, her eyes, her nose but never its tip.

That had been yesterday. She had wandered about the house like a half-awakened statue, deep in shock. She put on a jogging outfit and worn tennies, deflecting his every attempt to solace her. He fielded her phone calls—asking if he should, then doing so anyway when Thea ignored him. They were invasive and nasty, the outside ones, and those from the townsfolk were little better, bewilderment, rage, and abuse coming across the line in roughly equal measure. When it got to be too much, he unclipped the phones. She ignored him that night in bed, except to shy away when he tentatively touched her, wanting to love away her pain.

Today she’d gotten up as strong and closed-minded and pinch-voiced as he’d ever seen her. Her shower had lulled him back to sleep and then she was leaning over him in her robe, poking him awake, and pointing a finger in his face. “You will wear clothing today.” And that had been that. Until of course she had started to open the drapes in the family room and glimpsed the hordes of media hounds camped on the front lawn. Harold, hunched over toast and coffee, watched her reconnect the kitchen phone, which rang almost immediately; but she hung up and punched in a number, jabs that carried mayoral determination. Caroline, drifting in beauty by the fridge, ventured a guess, and he discreetly nodded. “Joe,” said Thea, “there are reporters besieging our house.” One of them rapped now on their door as if to confirm her words. “I want them arrested. What charge? Trespass, disturbing the peace, I don’t care. They’re at the police station too? This is ridiculous. Listen, tell them I’ll hold a press conference at City Hall ten o’clock sharp. Yes, announce it. Oh, and Joe? Don’t move on him yet, but I want you to reserve your best cell for Jameson. Oh, we’ll come up with something suitable. There’s got to be a law against what he did. Are you clear in your head? Good. Yes, sharper than ever.” Thea glanced over at him. “Well, you can never tell with Harold. At least he’s got his fat behind covered today and I promise you it’s going to stay that way.” She wrapped up and rang off, but the phone jangled again and she disconnected it.

The guy outside stopped knocking. Harold sniffed the rich steam of his coffee, Columbian plantations rioting in his nostrils. When he opened his eyes, Thea was standing over him scoping him out. “Harold?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Do you see any angels today?”

He winked at her. “Only you, dear.” And Caroline, he thought; and, in my mind’s eye, Dawn Fleischer, naked as the dawn itself.

Vans started up outside and drove off.

“Be sure about that, Harold. Be sure. In a little while, we’re going to be in the spotlight again, and the last thing I need is you messing up again.”

“This is marvelous coffee.”

“If any reporter asks you a question, you will defer to me. Don’t say a word out there. Understood?”

Tell her yes.

“That sounds like a fine plan, sweet Thea.”

Again her finger in his face. “Watch that sweet-Thea stuff, Harold. I’m having none of it. I’m reclaiming my life this morning and you will do nothing to screw it up, is that clear? Is it?”

*****

Goldie and Angelina hovered above them, entranced, as he and Mindy peered through the glass at the newborns, not knowing which one was Sarah’s little Amy. For the moment, it didn’t much matter, for they too were enthralled by the new life before them and by the cut-crystal clarity of the neonatal angels. Of the three nurses tending the infants, only the eldest sported an angel of her own, a benevolent banshee fluid as melted emeralds, and that nurse, glancing at their guardians, gave them a conspiratorial nod.

“Need some help?” A pleasant young man in hospital blue stood beside them.

Carver said, “We’re, um, looking for Sarah Haskell’s little girl.”

“Are you the grandfather?”

“Yes, I am.” Felt good to say so.

“Sarah and her husband have been wondering where you were,” said the young man. “Come with me.”

“Which baby—?” Mindy gestured toward the window.

“Amy’s not here. She’s with her mother.”

They followed him out the lounge door, Mindy engaging him in conversation and Carver too preoccupied to join in. He hadn’t seen or spoken to his son since the blooming of their angels had ended Monday’s shameful fight on the town square, and he wondered whether Tom really wanted him here or if Sarah was just putting the best face on things.

Sniff the air, then. The metallic rustle of Goldie’s voice delighted him anew.

“Yes, I will,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” said the orderly.

“Oh, nothing. Just talking to myself.”

The young man nodded. “Here she be,” he said, a hand toward the door on their right. “Enjoy your visit.”

Mindy widened her eyes at him and pushed in, Angelina throwing him back a similarly bemused smile as she drifted naked through the heavy wooden door.

Now or never, rippled Goldie.

“Right,” he said, taking a deep breath and following close behind Mindy.

Sarah had the bed nearest to the door. A curtain on ceiling runners curved about on one side to give her some privacy, though the other bed was empty. Flowers bloomed on the table beside her. He saw them, and he saw Sarah’s angel, whom she’d described over the phone but whom he’d never seen before, and then there was Sarah shifting her eyes from Mindy to him and saying, “Hi, Dad,” and there, coming into view on the near side of the bed was his son Tom, standing there, cradling his baby in his arms. The Merlinesque figure Sarah had mentioned glowed close by, a stunning idiot-savant sort of look on his face; he melted a kiss of blessing into Carver’s eyes and then turned his attention again fully to his charge. “Beautiful,” Carver said.

“Isn’t she gorgeous?” asked Tom, and Carver rushed in to marvel at his granddaughter, his anxiety up in smoke.

“A peach,” he said. “The apple of her daddy’s eye.” She gave a silent rosebud yawn, her twig fingers wrapped around Tom’s thumb. “A plum, a kiwi, a kumquat.”

Tom looked at him strangely. “Sure, Dad.” To Sarah, broadly: “I thought you said he was on the wagon.”

Carver laughed. “I am,” he assured, “thanks to Mindy here.” He introduced them, noting as he did so, that what Sarah had told him on the phone was true: Tom’s guardian, the fat cherub who recalled so vividly the infant Tom had been, was nowhere to be seen. He gave his daughter-in-law a glance as Mindy spoke to Tom, and volumes passed between them: unspoken alienation, resignation on her part, and a plea that Carver too suppress all talk of angels.

From the look on the face of his daughter-in-law’s companion and the sung phrases she dropped, it was clear that Sarah was of two minds. But he reached for her hand, squeezed it, and nodded his acquiescence.

“You want to hold her, Dad?”

He begged off but Tom insisted, and the insubstantial bundle gentled down into his arms, Tom’s and his own legs buckling for the passoff as if she were primed to explode if too greatly jarred. Carver cooed, and Goldie marveled; he caressed one rough-whorled fingertip along the wondrous softness of her cheek. Merlin was close and kind, and he wanted so much to acknowledge Amy’s angel with more than a glance. Instead, he passed Amy on to her mother, telling Sarah how beautiful both she and the baby were.

When he straightened, there was Tom. He stood closer than he needed to be and tears brimmed in his eyes. “Tom, are you—?”

Strong arms came around him. He returned his son’s hug. “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said.

“No, Dad. It’s me who should be sorry.” Tom looked at him. “And I am.” He renewed the embrace, not quite so frantic now, but Tom’s big hand lay warm and comforting at the back of Carver’s neck. “But I’m going to stand up for you from here on out, help you back on your feet.”

He broke from him, kissed Tom’s hands, placed his own on top of them. “I’m there already, and I have Mindy and my Gold—” he caught himself “—my own good sense to thank for it. And I intend to stay on my feet.”

“It’s been a rough time,” said Tom. “Rough for this family and rough for the city. It’s all I can do to keep a civil tongue when Doctor Keeshan comes in the check on Sarah and the baby. She’s Jameson’s daughter, you know.”

“Yes, we know,” said Mindy.

“Must carry some of that pixie dust in with her from home,” he said archly. “We saw the old man in the square Wednesday, and that was bad enough; but, as grateful as I am to her for delivering Amy, I feel plenty of bitterness too: She had us seeing storks and wizards in the birthing room, if you can believe it. Far as I’m concerned, she’s sullied the memories I should have had of Amy’s birth.”

“Please, Tom, don’t be too hard.”

Tom gestured to her. “She’s still got my wife half-believing that guardian-angel crap. Went whole hog for it until I talked some sense into her.”

Resist the urge. He’ll come around.

“You know how Mindy and I look at it, Tom?” Carver said, giving his love a quick complicitous look. “No one was more taken in than we were. We lay naked for hours near the gazebo yesterday, and we saw our own and others’ guardians, and we believed as fiercely as anyone in that crowd believed. Sure, we were hoodwinked.” He wrinkled one eye at Mindy. “But while it lasted, it was glorious, and it helped me, placebo or no; it helped me through the DT’s, and it fixed my blurred sight on what was important and what I could let fall by the wayside. It brought me Mindy Rutherford here,” he reached over and gave Mindy a sidelong embrace, “and it brought me to this moment with you and Sarah and magical Amy. And I say Amen to it and Thanks be to Ted Jameson and those two kids for getting that particular ball rolling.”

May have gone too far.

Goldie, sweets, he thought, a man’s got to tell at least part of the truth, especially to his own son.

“If that’s the way you see it, Dad, then so be it,” said Tom. “I’m glad, more than I can say, that you pulled out of your tailspin. But I’m also glad—not glad so much as it just satisfies my sense of justice—that Ted Jameson is going to get his comeuppance. You can’t make fools of an entire town and expect to walk away scot-free. Radio on the way over here this morning said the mayor’s going to hold a press conference at ten. Assuming she survives yesterday’s scandal, I think we’ll see one famous writer’s head roll down Main Street before the day is out.”

Mindy said, “We ought to do something.”

She’s right, Carver.

Tom countered, “Staying out of the steamroller’s way strikes me as a better idea.”

There’s much to be said for that position too.

Great. Lots of guidance there. “And Amy, my girl. What do you advise?” He reached over and folded back the blue blanket his grandchild was wrapped in. But her fists were idle upon her chest, her eyelids were closed, and the dots of her nostrils constricted and dilated with the easy rhythm of her breathing.

*****

Thea was coming to the conclusion of her statement, a simple mea culpa she’d typed into her computer and printed out but had not let him see, a plea for forgiveness by her citizens and by all Americans as morally outraged by what had taken place yesterday as she was in hindsight and with her vision unclouded by chicanery. Her threats toward the perpetrators were veiled but unmistakable, a diamond edge to her voice in those passages. Above him in the crowded conference room, Caroline floated intrigued but unworried. Her uncanny resemblance to his wife in her thinner, long-haired days at Berkeley made Harold wonder what influence angels, especially invisible ones, might have on romantic entanglements in the general populace. On the other hand, he mused, she didn’t look one bit like Dawn Fleischer.

Thea was wrapping up. She was a trained politician, a compelling speaker, and the reporters in the room, just as trained in hearing statements of this sort, sensed her conclusion nearing and shifted audibly in anticipation of their attack. A number of faces he recognized from years of eavesdropping on C-SPAN, and their presence confirmed—as if the blanket of TV and radio coverage hadn’t already done so—that in a lean week, the undoing of Luke Petrakis and his hometown had captivated the nation’s attention as nothing since Anita Hill went to Washington. One reporter in a bow-tie and with his knobby knees shining through his crossed pant legs looked especially voracious, and his arm shot up like a salute, thin white wrist, clawed fist with a pen poking up out of it. But Thea’s ears were drawn to the yowling chorus of questioners on her left. Her steely eyes chose one of them—a young woman who looked prim and innocent to Harold’s eyes—and she gestured decisively in the young woman’s direction.

“Mayor Cosgrove,” she said, her painted lips opening wider than Harold would have expected, “how well did you know Luke Petrakis as a boy and do you have any animosity toward him for what happened yesterday?” In the rich stew of sweat that assaulted Harold’s nose, this pretty woman’s natural aroma captivated him for the moment. He imagined kissing that lovely mouth which hinged so wide at the jaw and asserted itself with such confidence.

“Animosity? No,” Thea replied. “You people make far too much of celebrity—raising them up, tearing them down. You ought to leave poor Luke alone, though I don’t suppose you will, just as you ought to go away and allow this fine city to heal itself in its own good time. Mister Petrakis is a victim, as I and my husband and all the good citizens of Auroville are victims.”

Yelping news-hounds in suits and ties volleyed forth overlapping cries of “Madame Mayor! Madame Mayor!” until, from out of the pack, one voice broke through, an assured baritone Harold had heard many times. “Mayor Cosgrove, a victim you may be, and far be it from me to doubt the word of a public official, but I must say in all candor, Madame Mayor,” and here his brow found its ironic bent, “that you seemed to be enjoying your victimization, so much so that I wonder if it’s entirely fair to claim to be a victim!”

How extremely out of touch that poor man is.

She was right. It stunned Harold to realize it. How commanding the tube made these geeky people. And how very diminished and ordinary and oddly twisted they became when they stepped out from behind the photons and took on flesh and blood. Besides which, he was getting tired of the way they smelled; the tension, the constant brush with strife, these clung to them, confined them, made them smaller than they were meant to be.

“Sir, your insensitivity astounds me.” Thea withered the man, or tried to, with her stare, but Harold felt—as a seismologist senses tremors lost to those not as finely attuned—the faultlines in her facade as she spoke. “Did the people of Jonestown willingly drink Kool-Aid and give it willingly to their children? They did. And were they victims? They were. As I stated earlier, the effect was as powerful and overwhelming as a psychedelic slipped into a drink, but more insidious, because the transformation of the personality was so thorough and seemingly natural that it felt selected instead of imposed, as if the assurance I exhibit before you today were merely a false front, behind which the true self lay concealed. But the glaring eye of television, which brooks no deceit, has brought me back to myself. It has torn away the gaudy surface that pretended depth. It has exposed, in ways we will be hard-pressed to live down in Auroville, the lie thrust upon us that heaven on earth is an attainable goal; and it has left us tangled in shame.”

The man with the bow-tie broke in before the room had a chance to restart its yapping: “Do you seriously think you have any viability left as mayor of this city? Or in fact won’t you be forced to step down? Where, outside of the political circus in Italy a few years ago, has a woman as sexually compromised as the Thea Cosgrove we all saw on TV yesterday been allowed to hold public office?”

I’m afraid he’s right.

Harold nodded to Caroline. The looks they’d received riding through downtown and walking into City Hall did not bode well for Thea’s prospects. Even the commiseration of those officials who had bloomed guardians and then thrown them off was tempered with a holier-than-thou attitude he felt pulsating beneath their surface loyalty to her. And as the news conference progressed, those who had committed themselves to sitting impaneled up here beside their mayor and her mate seemed increasingly discomfited.

“That,” said Thea, “is for the people to decide. I have received, and gratefully so, much support from those who have been through the same ordeal. I hope to garner, and I pray for, the support and forgiveness and good will of those who have not. To them I say, That was not your mayor debasing herself on that screen. That was a woman, and her husband, and hundreds of your fellow citizens, in the throes of a trance cast so wide and so deep it did not feel like a trance. And I say it again, those responsible for this outrage will not go unpunished. Even as I speak, my staff, in consultation with law enforcement authorities countywide, is deciding precisely what battery of charges shall be levied against them. And I promise you this—the charges will be substantial and quick in coming.”

Again they surged in, and again Thea masterfully beat back the tide. There at the podium, she seemed like the commander of a battleship, or the ship itself, its blunt prow fronting wave after wave of hostility, surging ahead under punishment that would overwhelm a vessel not so well fortified as she. He admired her and stood in awe of her. Yet he did not love her. That revelation stunned but did not sadden him. He and his guardian had a brief exchange about it, one sufficiently animated to draw the attention of a reporter near the far door. “We’d like to hear what your husband has to add to what you’ve said,” he chimed in as the questions dwindled and Thea began to wrap up.

“My husband’s views accord with mine,” she said.

The reporter shot back, “The humiliation was at least as great for him, Madame Mayor, as it was for you, and the American people are entitled to know how he’s coping.”

Harold smiled and waved the question away. But Thea made too much of her rebuff, and the sharks, sensing fresh blood, thrashed about with renewed hunger until, throwing him her don’t-you-dare look, Thea stepped aside, standing behind him as if she were prepared to throttle him at his first gaffe. Caroline floated before the podium, her eyes level with the bunched microphone cables super-highwaying off in all directions. Harold was nervous and exhilarated and amused all at once, a little boy whose pockets bulged with nickels and for whose attention hordes of candy jars clamored. Under his angel’s guidance, he tentatively put up a finger and gestured toward the young woman with the luscious lips and the eyes deep enough to drown in.

Why, the young woman asked, did he seem so relaxed? What explained the twinkle in his eye, the bemused smile, the look of self-satisfaction? Was it her imagination or did he perhaps feel not quite as hostile toward a certain famous author as his wife did?

“I feel,” he said, pausing to formulate a truthful reply, pausing to listen to his angel, which amounted to the same thing, “no hostility toward Mister Jameson, nor toward the two children. On the contrary, I feel nothing but gratitude toward them.”

“And why is that, sir?” That dress belonged off her body, her ardent flesh pressed beneath his, sheets tugged taut about them like hatch marks on a topographic map. He felt his phallus begin to thicken with blood.

“Because, my lovely lady, without them, I never would have been brought back in touch with my angel, who, as you I think already suspect, is floating now in front of me—” He had more to add, but the room erupted into pandemonium, and Thea and a staffer—Brian Forrester, who always looked as if he’d just bitten into a bad apricot—took him by the elbows and were whisking him off the dais and out the side door, a frenzied wave of reporters sweeping in to cut them off but failing. And Thea lit into him, soon as that door was closed, as she’d never done in their thirty-five years together. Without Caroline, he would have felt humiliated by Thea’s public excoriation of him, but now he simply let it roll through him, nodding, and slipping in the odd word of apology, and watching the light of his love for her dim and gutter in that sterile antechamber, her colleagues and staff pretending not to be there as she raved.

*****

The worst of it for June was not winding her erratic way through town, nor was it her choiceless choice to take Bedford Avenue (there being too much uncharted forest to risk losing herself)—but rather the replay over and over of her parents’ upset. Jeannie was some help, to be sure. But Jeannie was the main bone of contention, and whenever she attempted to allay June’s anxiety, it only poured oil on her parents’ impassioned arguments. Was the invisible companion of her childhood real, a guardian angel she had lost and now recovered, and who, in conjunction with Ward and Grampa, had helped the three of them open others’ eyes to their angels? Or was she the product of an imagination gone overboard, a fantastic but illusory will-o’-the-wisp, her belief in which had been fed and encouraged by equally misguided yet mutually reinforcing souls? June could see it either way. She both believed and did not believe, her mind marveling at how easy and how tough it was to live in the confines of a conundrum; and her uncertainty, while it did not wipe Jeannie away completely, surely accounted for the continuing waver and flicker in her image, the hollow tones her voice had taken on.

She lucked out along Bedford. Few cars whizzed by at this hour, and fewer driven by people she recognized. She turned unobserved into Mariposite Lane, passing the neatly manicured Grant place and proceeding along the blacktopped ribbon of road until Ward’s house rose to view. Vans were parked there and people standing about, one with a headset on and a curved black wire defining his jawbone and curled in toward his mouth.

Into the woods.

June backtracked, heard a vehicle turn with its tires popping pebbles into the road behind her, ducked behind an oak tree and let it pass, then angled into the encroaching woods enough to keep the house in sight but not be sighted herself and sufficiently deep that her movements would not attract attention. She used Grampa’s treehouse as a guide and an axis, homing in; when she broke through, Ward stood beside the clubhouse, one hand on it, peering hopefully in her direction. Timothy, hovering at its rooftop, turned a shade of blackened crimson, his animation dampened even as his face lit up at the sight of her and Jeannie. June met Ward halfway, gripping him tightly to her and savoring the welcome of his embrace.

“I thought you might be Grampa,” he said.

“He still hasn’t come back?”

“Nope.”

“I slipped around the TV people.”

“They’ve been out there all day wanting to talk to me and Grampa. Joydrop’s been turning them away but new ones keep coming back and then the old ones recycle again. Mom came home from the clinic and they wouldn’t let her inside until she yelled at Joy to call the police and they backed off. They had her in tears. Or close to it; Mom’s pretty tough.”

He ushered June into the clubhouse, joining her where she collapsed on the bed. And then he noticed her angel’s translucency. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happening to Jeannie?” There was hurt in his voice, as if he didn’t think he could endure another blow.

“Well,” she began, rising in pitch, then turning away to toy with the fringe on his bedspread. “I’m starting to have doubts. I mean obviously I believe enough that I can still see and hear her, but I’m also starting to wonder if it’s not a trick of the mind, if maybe my parents and the TV commentators and the experts they’ve been interviewing are right about how easily the brain can be fooled.”

“They’re wrong.” A simple statement of fact.

“But how do you know that?”

“Because I’ve lived all my life with Timothy, and all that time he’s been self-evident as air and earth. Maybe more so because I had to hide—from everyone except Grampa and, for a time, the Shy Friends Club—the fact that I saw him at all. He was my secret and he captured my attention on those grounds alone, apart from his personality and his love of color and movement.” The next comment he made, as flip as it was, did nothing to conceal the desolation that lay beneath: “Though he seems—yes, Mister Timothy of the drawn face, you do—to have let events pinch him down into a black funk.”

June felt a sudden alarm. Jeannie’s mouth was moving but nothing reached June’s ears. And she realized as well that as Ward spoke, she had been distancing herself enough to cast him in the role of a certifiably insane if amiable adolescent, hearing him through that filter and finding to her horror that it made perfect sense, no less than taking him as a loving friend genuinely angeled. “There’s where we differ, Ward,” she said, amazed how little of the panic now spiraling upward in her spilled into her voice, which carried on in its mildly fretful way. “I’ve lived most of my life without Jeannie. The world seemed complete before she came back into my life, and it also seems complete and certainly more beautiful with her in it but in a different way—and for the life of me I don’t know which is right.”

“Don’t you think—?”

“I mean if she’s real, how can she be fading?” Now she heard her own desperation seep into her words, though it merely hinted at the despair growing inside. “How come people aren’t trusting their own senses if the angels are real? Why is everybody lapsing back so easily into not believing, just because TV tells them they’re wrong? It doesn’t make sense.”

Ward lifted his ear to the air, where a translucent Timothy said something she couldn’t hear. “Like he says, old habits. Maybe for most folks, it’s too much too soon. It’s so great, they don’t trust it. It needs reinforcing. And as soon as the everyday world rushes in to tell them they’re deluded, they sink back into the comfort of . . . hey, are you okay?” He’d been going on, not looking while she came apart, the fear of loss rising in her so that her throat constricted and her breathing shallowed with dread.

She shook her head, blinking back tears. “No, Ward. I’m not okay. It’s real bad. Hold me.” She grabbed for him, saw his confused face, felt the solidity of his arms warm about her. “I want to believe in her. Don’t let me lose her. Help me.”

“I will,” Ward said. “You won’t lose her.” But his words were empty. He didn’t know how to prevent it, not a clue, and June could tell he meant well, but that “meaning well” wasn’t going to cut it. Printed on the air in faded ink was Jeannie’s half-face, her nose a stray brushstroke, her lips little more, and concentrated in what was left of her was June’s desperate wish for her angel’s survival.

But just as Jeannie was poised to wink out entirely, nothing but erasure in sunlight—in fact as one moist eye swept a sickled gleam about its pupil before being lidded into oblivion—the swirl instead continued on, recapturing the eye and sweeping in widening spirals to draw Jeannie’s color back, arc by arc, plumping it with substance. June saw her angel’s grateful eye fix on the door. She sensed, even before she saw, Grampa on the threshold, filling the frame with ancient assurance. And there beside him, half her body poking through Ward’s bookshelves and a smile on her face a mile wide, was Esme, brilliant, strong, and one stroke shy of wild.

*****

Esme had, despite the ache in his legs, urged him on for reasons she was unable to identify. But now he stood in the door, feeling the reinforcing faith of himself and his grandson and watching June’s crisis pass. As he felt now, and as June later confirmed, doubts which had seemed plausible one moment washed away the next in the light of undeniable truth. June couldn’t explain it—in fact they together came up with all sorts of delusional theories in the ensuing hours to explain away angels, dismissing each theory with a joke. But there came a point, and June had reached it, where the evidence of one’s senses, and of a sixth sense beneath, was so overwhelming that one trusted it over all logical objection.

As they ran to embrace him, Grampa came forward into the clubhouse, hugging them so tight their angular bodies threatened to imprint their bone-lines on his flesh. And then Joydrop and his daughter Laura rushed in, Joy having spied him out the kitchen window at the moment he emerged from the forest. He said nothing about Nemo’s absence; a glance from Laura and her chubby guardian Topsy cautioned silence. Soon after, Joydrop, having unburdened herself—in the context of everyone else’s recounting the events of the last twenty-four hours—of the story of how she’d lost Luke Petrakis and Nemo, and how Luke had been shunted off to the UN, nodded and made to leave, saying she would keep tabs on the house and the growing number of people, media or otherwise, milling about in front of it.

“You need some help?” asked Grampa.

“No,” she said, haggard but perked-up at seeing him safe and sound. Then she left, hauling her limbs up the lawn toward the house. In the near distance, a car door slammed, then another.

“So, Doctor Keeshan,” he said, hugging Laura, “how’s the baby business?”

She shrugged. “The babies are beautiful as ever. I can’t say the same for their parents, though.” She told him how wonderful things had been until yesterday, Merlin and other baby guardians manifesting in all their purity. And then how the worm turned as soon as people lost their angels, how she’d had to clamp down quickly on any mention of storks and companions—though it pained her to have to stifle her wonder at the miracles she was midwife to—and how cold she’d been treated by moms and dads who had once trusted her but who now thought her party to her father’s game of deception.

“That’s not fair.” Anger simmered in him.

“Fair or not, my docket’s suddenly very sparse, women have decided en masse that they prefer another ob/gyn, and the cooperation I’m used to from my nursing staff seems to have snagged on the nastiness of the TV coverage.”

You need to set that right, Ted.

“Like Esme says, I need to set it right. Bring those media jackasses on and let me square off with them.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Ward cautioned, “what you’d be in for.”

June agreed, looking comically earnest.

Grampa started to brush off their remarks, but Laura chimed in again. “They’re right, Dad. I think we need to fill you in on what’s been happening since Auroville made the evening news.” And they did, describing in detail the personal fallout each of them had endured and the constant drone of news coverage that had built and spread from more staid nightly news programs to info-tainment shows to some sort of newfangled trash-tabloid crap he’d only been dimly aware existed. News crews had begun to outnumber tourists downtown, and everyone, it seemed, from the editor of the Gazette to high school kids starting to stock up on school supplies at Manning’s, were subject to the constant yammer of questioning. Ward said he’d seen Mister Gregerson from the ice cream parlor go from heavily ridiculed affirmation of angel existence, to a wounded muted uncertainty, and at last to a tight-faced denial of them, coupled with a blast at Ted Jameson as a corrupter of children.

“That’s us,” said June.

“Bring on the hemlock,” he said, rolling his eyes. A roar of motorcycles ruffled the afternoon air, a low scour of macadam that came to a halt in front of the house, then peeled back one layer at a time as each cyclist killed his engine. Where he expected silence, Grampa heard what had been there before but had escaped awareness, it had grown so slowly: the rolling mull of a crowd, not a Fourth-of-July crowd, nothing festive in their tone, but something far uglier than that, something moblike and restive.

Joydrop. Esme had a deer-in-headlights frozenness to her voice.

“I wonder if maybe I ought to check on her,” he said. There was no glimpse of Joy in the kitchen. Nora’s empty window caught his attention for a moment, sadness flooding in, but the sweep of more cars along the road diverted him again, and he wondered what the devil was going on.

“I’ll go,” said Laura, getting up from Ward’s rocking chair, Topsy at her back like a clinging lemur. The kids were sitting cross-legged on the bed and Grampa had planted himself on Ward’s gnomish three-legged stool, but they all stiffened at the shattering sound of breaking glass, which was followed by a shift in the crowd murmur, a sway toward muted dismay here, a billow of approval there, shouts and smatters of applause.

Joydrop, Ted. Panic now.

Grampa rose, his mind racing. “Ward, Laura, one of you go up top, call the police, 911, quickly. June, all of you, up the ladder as fast as you can.”

Laura said, “Dad, let me go with you.”

He was about to protest but Esme nodded and he said, “Come on then. They want me, they can have me. Calm the mongrels down, shame them into civilized behavior.”

Topsy said to Laura, Might hurt him.

“Dad, they might—”

“I don’t think so.” He hurried her along, up the lawn and, sliding back the glass door, into the kitchen. “They’ve got their blasted media with them. If nothing else, those bastards with their mikes and cameras will keep the angry villagers from turning into a mob. Joy, where are you?”

“In here, Ted!” The fear in her voice was solid as steel. Grampa raced toward the front room, Laura in tow behind him, shouting caution.

12. Goatscape

They spent a good long time at the hospital and then it seemed prudent and right to leave Tom and Sarah and the baby by themselves. Mindy suggested burgers at an eatery east on Main near Sheridan. On the way back, passing the town square, they saw perhaps fifty people, men and women, adults and kids, sitting on or gathered about the steps of the gazebo. Curious, they drifted in.

No companions here, Carver. Keep it under wraps.

He nodded to Goldie and saw that Mindy heard too. No companions meant, sadly, that they were now set apart from most of the townsfolk, who fell into two camps: those who had missed their chance to bloom and those who had bloomed but had then denied their angels in the wake of an ongoing media assault. Of those who’d maintained their guardians, no one was trumpeting that fact to the heavens, opting for covert smiles and meaningful looks instead.

Al DeSario was seated on the top step, holding forth. His sons sat on either side of him, the older one in black leather, the younger one . . . but Carver saw now that his observation had been mistaken. The effervescent companion he recalled from the day before was still sprightly fizzing above the boy’s head, even as his father inveighed against Jameson and his possessed kids. “Listen,” he was saying, “you see all kinds in Guidance—the good kids, the rotten kids, the devious ones who just want to take advantage of you but haven’t yet learned to hide it. Now these two? A surface of perfection. But underneath is nothing but your basic contempt for your fellow man. Wouldn’t surprise me if they thought the whole thing up themselves and dragged the boy’s nutcase grampa into it.” The younger son’s face blanched and his eyes widened as he registered Carver and Mindy and their angels. Carver reassured him with a pinch of the lips and a subtle shake of his head.

“My dad’s right,” the leather-boy chimed in, his head moving about as if to cast his remarks on particular ears, though he made eye contact with no one. “Somebody should go out there and take ‘em down, teach ‘em a lesson.”

Lyle from the used bookstore spoke up. “Whatever it is, something needs to happen, and quick. I’m old enough it didn’t matter I don’t mind admitting I was fooled. But this town deserves better’n she’s got. And everybody here knows it.” His finger jabbed the air and his head gave an abrupt nod to signal he was done.

“Damn right, old man,” said Al DeSario, and then his boy laid a hand on his shoulder and pointed to Carver and Mindy. “Well if it isn’t Mister and Missus Naked America. I’ll bet you two have plenty to beef about.”

Watch it, Carver. Tell your lie and fade back. Good advice, the best. But what sort of man would he be if he went along like everyone else? Not the time or place for heroism. Was there nothing worth standing up for? Plenty of things. Just save it for later.

The opening DeSario had offered them could have been smoothed over with mindless reinforcement, all he wanted, and then he would have nattered on to the next thing. But Carver could not bring himself to gloss over the ugliness of this man’s mood, nor could he betray the implicit bond he felt with DeSario’s younger son.

“Yes, I guess so,” Mindy offered. Then she tugged at his arm, whispering “Let’s go.”

“You guess so?” DeSario leaned forward, a smile on his face. “Lady, they had you stripped naked under that tree over yonder, you and your rummy boyfriend here, all your parts hanging out for everyone to see. ‘Course, it may be you liked that. I got to tell you I liked seeing you that way. Maybe you’d like to come up here right now and give everybody another look.”

No, don’t say it.

“There’s no call to talk like that.” The words came out louder than Carver had intended.

“Maybe you don’t mind being—” The beefy man cocked his head at him in disbelief. “What did you say?”

“I said you owe the lady an apology.”

DeSario sprang up, came off the steps. “Listen here, Haskell, I don’t need any drunken bum telling me what I do and don’t owe to anyone.” He jabbed at Carver’s chest, a stung point on the breastbone. “You sit around week after week, stinking up the square with your mewling and puking, spoiling it for the rest of us; and now you have the gall, after what that creep Jameson did to us, to tell me I owe an apology to your hot-shit floozy here. I don’t suppose you’re on his side of this—?”

It got to him, DeSario’s jab and his pressing forward to throw Carver off-balance and force a retreat (no don’t) and then the renewed insult to Mindy (oh jeez Carver, he’s bigger than you) so that his best instinct took over and his hand hauled back and the slap hit the approaching bear loud and solid across the cheek. His head turned and his fat lips quivered, and then the head snapped back enraged and he was upon Carver, tooth and claw.

*****

Mike loved his dad. That angel crap had sidetracked them both, but now that that had been blown away, he felt a deeper kinship with his father than ever. No way could a man let the motherfuckers sneak any bullshit by him; he needed to see it coming, rebuff it, and force them to eat it twenty times over as punishment. It felt good to dish it out. It had felt real good dishing it out to Patti in his bedroom yesterday, and it was going to feel real good helping his dad take this wino down a few pegs in front of his big-titted bitch.

He knew, as he came down the steps, how football pros felt breaking onto the field. The crowd was with him all the way—angry moms, shopkeepers with burnished glints in their eyes, wimpy bureaucrats from City Hall showing mean streaks he’d never have suspected in a million years—all of them shouting encouragement to him and his dad, helping bind them tighter. Scrannel-throated bastard dodged about so that Mike’s dad was only able to glance a few off his jaw at first, and the drunken fucker landed a lucky punch or two that snapped the larger man’s head back. But then Mike shot in on his father’s left and knuckle-punched the sucker in the stomach, doubling him over and exposing his pained face to their fists. It was a prideful thing, the drubbing they dealt him—DeSario blows: his dad an expert at them, the no-nonsense pistoning of his fists, as if he were pounding dough, a familiar rhythm Mike had suffered under until he was Calvin’s age and fought back; and Mike himself, leaving the face to his father, concentrating on raising bruises on the bastard’s upper body, his arms and his back, keeping him on his feet by adjusting his balance with counterblows. Still, the man was bound to collapse, and when he did, Mike’s boots were ready. The big-titted bitch sweetened it all with her high-pitched protests and her feeble attempts to intervene.

But suddenly something plowed into him, throwing him against his father and hurtling him to the ground. Mike’s head fell back and struck hard earth, making the sky spin. When he sat up, his dad had Calvin by the gazebo, smacking him with his open hand, shaking him by one tightly gripped arm, bellowing obscenities at him. The wino and his bitch were halfway across the park, her trying to rush him along as fast as she could. Mike toyed with the idea of dashing over there and doing enough damage to put them both in the hospital or the morgue, but dismissed it. There’d be time enough later and he had a feeling he’d much prefer dealing with the woman indoors someplace alone.

“You little prick,” his father was shouting, “what do I have to do, cripple you? Because I will. I’ll snap you the fuck over my knee if I have to.” To the crowd: “Look at him. My pride and joy. Fucking turncoat.”

“Jameson got to him!” someone shouted.

“Damned right he did,” his father answered, and Mike, face flush with fervor, chimed in his agreement. “And the only way we’re going to set things right is to pay a visit to our resident hot-shot and take it out of his hide.”

“We can’t do it alone,” said a woman with rolling-pin arms and no neck. “We need more people.”

Mike spoke up. “There’s lots of people were here all week, here or under the fucker’s treehouse a few days ago. Bet they’re just as pissed off as we are.”

“My boy’s right. You know who they are. Call them. People who were here, whose lives were turned upside down by Jameson and those kids. People who have come to their senses and all they’re doing is steaming about it at home or at work. Let’s do it. Everybody think of five people and call them now. Tell them to haul their asses over to Jameson’s place by two o’clock. One way or another, we’re going to make the son-of-a-bitch pay.”

Football again. It was like breaking out of a huddle only lots of folks came over to shake his and his father’s hands, just one quick hard-edged thanks, the rage spilling out of them like righteousness. Mike standing shoulder to shoulder with his dad: It felt good, felt exceeding good, his knuckles still stinging, his brother slumped in shame against the side of the gazebo, his mind weighing the pros and cons of phoning up Richie Feit and Joey Russo and Greg Gormezano and the others, before coming down decisively on the pro side.

*****

Harold Porter felt an amused tickle inside. His wife was so steamed at him, she was pretending he was invisible even as she never for one moment let him out of her sight. At the moment, she was pacing her office, waiting for his brother Joe to arrive.

Just a little frantic, isn’t she? There was sympathy in Caroline’s voice.

Feeling under the gun I guess, Harold replied, being careful this time not to vocalize; poor woman looked like she needed to take up smoking.

Someone had wheeled in a TV monitor on a tall stand, a dormant VCR chained to a shelf below it. A sour-faced Brian Forrester stood beside it, his white hairless hand holding it down as if he expected it to levitate without his lent gravity. The sound was off. Luke Petrakis, a garment bag slung over one shoulder, deplaned and waved away questions for the umpteenth time. An immaculately coiffed and manicured Ken-doll read copy, his empty head giving reassuring nods as his thin lips shaped the words. Then, there was Thea at her press conference not an hour before, a jump-cut to Harold at the lectern—looking not at all like himself, he thought—and then the rush toward the door as they hustled him from the room.

“Where the hell is he?” Thea said, addressing no one in particular. Onscreen, the blue-blur footage ran again. “Jesus!” she swore, bristling past Forrester to toggle the damned thing off. It crackled into blackness.

Bess Condon’s Valium voice honeyed over the intercom: “Mayor Cosgrove, the sheriff is here to see you.”

“Dammit, Bess,” Thea shot back, thumb on the button, “I told you to send him in as soon as he arrived. Now do it. And wipe that smirk off your face. I can feel it in the wires and I swear I’ll fire you right out the door if I see a trace of it ever again.”

“But, Mayor Cosgrove, I—”

“Just do it!”

A moment later Joe walked through the door, sidearm snapped shut by his side. He nodded to everyone, then a glance at Harold. “Hey there, big brother,” he said, “I hear you caused quite a stir this morning.”

“Joe,” said Thea, “the next time he opens his mouth, I want you to put a bullet in his brain.” It didn’t sound like a joke. “I had things well in hand and then, I don’t know what I could have been thinking, I gave him the mike. We’ve got to come down hard on Jameson, deflect attention from this morning’s disaster. Go easy on the kids though. Could backfire too easily. But I want that man in jail by three o’clock at the latest. The sooner the better.”

Joe shrugged. “Disturbing the peace?”

“If that’s the best you’ve got. Conspiracy charges, vagrancy, drunk and disorderly conduct, I don’t care what it is, just put him away. Let’s train the cameras on him for a change.”

“The girl’s missing.”

“June Lockridge?”

Joe nodded. “Parents called a few hours ago. She ran away this morning. I’ve had squad cars cruising the streets. Nothing.”

Thea pointed at him. “Tack on kidnapping charges. I’ll bet you even money she’s with Jameson.”

“Could be. We tried calling there, but the phone is busy, or more likely disconnected, what with the TV folks trying to autodial their way through.”

Harold surveyed his brother, saddened that he too had lost his guardian. But then even as a child, Joe had been more serious and stiff-minded about things, frustrated to tears over jigsaw puzzles Harold could remember going into hysterical fits of laughter over.

Richer now.

He glanced at Caroline, her face bathed in whimsy, a wisp of impishness there. She was right. His brother was once more rigid with business—but his edges, though hard, seemed subtly rounded, as if he’d come out of belief into not resentment but some sort of completeness. What’s your opinion? he thought to his angel.

I’d say there’s hope for brother Joey.

Harold laughed, then stifled it.

Thea stopped talking and skewered him with a glance. “And he goes with us. I want him close by at all times. Joe, I know he’s your brother and you love him, and I love him too”—(a politician’s lie, he thought; a wife’s lie to herself)—”but we need to wait a couple of days, at least until the TV people move on to the next big story, before looking into professional help for him. Brian here’s got a short-list of doctors and deprogrammers at his desk.”

Don’t say it. Caroline caught him on the brink of protesting that he was the healthy one, that they were the ones in need of deprogramming. She might change her mind and put you away right now. And that was so. Not that he believed for an instant that they could hold him, nor that attempts to commit him would stick. But he didn’t want to miss out on witnessing what was to come next. He didn’t want to let Thea out of his sight, no, not for the time it took to take a leak.

Forrester nodded like solemnity itself, to which Joe said, “I say we defer any talk of doctors until Harold and I have had a chance to sit down over a beer and hash this thing out.”

“Sure whatever,” she said, a hand waving dismissively in the air, “but it’s time to remove the beam from the eye of this city.” She bulled out from behind her desk, fully expecting—and she was right, of course, which amazed and tickled him anew—that he and his brother would follow in her wake. Bess Condon put on her best attempt at sobriety as Mayor Cosgrove passed by her desk, but Harold winked at her and she lowered her face into a smile. Thea found the brass doorknob, grimaced back at them, said, “Repeat after me: No comment!” turned the knob, and then they were out beyond the safety and quiet of the mayor’s antechamber—Thea followed by Harold and Caroline and Harold’s brother Joe—arrowing through a Stock Market’s worth of frantic faces and news-hunger and a yammering after scoops that both saddened and elated Harold, and there she was, the lovely woman from the front row, and her sweet beautiful mouth was moving too in its lovely wide scarlet way, and her eyes were inviting him anew to drown himself in her, and he thought of Dawn and her, the two of them together in his arms, luscious womanhood—but then Joe hustled him along, and the smartly-dressed vision that was one of his lady-loves (You must find out her name!) was swallowed up behind him in a sea of roil and ravin.

*****

Looks like bad news, his guardian offered, her golden flesh reddening momentarily in odd counterpoint to Mindy’s acute blanching as she nodded into the phone.

“No kidding,” said Carver, his face throbbing inside as if a work crew with jackhammers had taken up residence in his bones. The old armchair felt good against his bare skin except for the left shoulder blade—instinctively kept away from the faded green cushion—which DeSario’s boy had brutalized near to breaking.

“They are? I . . . yes, Mrs. Fleischer, that’s . . . well, I’m sure she . . . oh no, we’re . . . I don’t think we can . . . uh huh . . . uh huh . . . okay, I’ll discuss it with him . . . all right.” She hung up.

“Minister’s wife?” One side of his face was bruised and puffy as if ineptly Novocained and his words came out sounding like fizzled popovers.

Following Angelina in from the kitchen, Mindy sat in front of him once more beside the card table decked with gauze and bandages and a basin of warm water with a blood-streaked washcloth floating in it. “Yes. She got a call from Lyle Quinn.” Mindy seemed distracted, and the color did not want to return to her face. Lightly, she brushed her fingertips along his hand where it rested on the arm of the chair. She looked at him, the fret not having left her eyes since the fight began. “Are you all right?”

“We’ll have to scrub plans for any marathon runs, but I’ll survive.”

“You’re sure you don’t want an ambulance?”

“I broke some bones when I was a kid. I know what it feels like. And this time everything’s okay. All surface injury. You can’t keep a good Haskell down. So my father claimed anyway.” Her concern was beautiful, if excessive, but the phone call had increased it, had sent it shooting out along new paths. “Now what else is bothering you?”

“I’ve never heard such anger, or any anger at all for that matter, from Marge Fleischer,” Mindy began. “A roll of stamps once a month. Always a smile. But her daughter is making no secret of her angel and her continuing belief in it, not to her family at least. And Reverend Fleischer has apparently gone all hellfire and brimstone over it.”

More to this than that.

“Yeah, what Goldie said.” Carver grimaced, feeling the tight stretch of bandage against skin as he breathed and, beneath it, the trauma of battered flesh regrouping to begin its slow healing. “Something else is upsetting you, more than my bruises and more than Marge Fleischer’s domestic problems. Tell me what it is.”

Mindy lost more color, looking nearly as white, in an obverse way, as her angel’s sublime white-chocolate white. She looked suddenly like a little girl lost and verging on tears. “I’m afraid for Ted Jameson. I’m afraid for Ward, and for June Lockridge. For the whole household.”

“Why?”

“They’re phoning everybody, Carver. They’re forming a lynch mob.”

The base of his skull tingled suddenly, as though the chill blast of an arctic wind had frosted his neck. “Lyle was at the gazebo,” he said, recalling the man’s shouts of triumph, his raw red face, as Mike DeSario doubled Carver up.

She nodded. “He called the Fleischers. Now they’re on the phone to everyone they know, and God knows how many others are doing the same.”

“We’ve got to help them,” he said, the simultaneity of Goldie’s words lending their dyadic sentiment strength and urgency. “Where’s my shirt?” His body protested as he made to rise.

“Carver, you’re in no condition to—”

“Doesn’t matter.” He willed his stressed bones out of the chair, battling the protests of his flesh with an irrepressible determination. “I’ll walk there if I have to,” he said, snagging his shirt from where it lay draped over the couch. Every effort cost him dear, as if a suit of wounds were stapled to his skin.

Mindy had a brief impassioned argument with Angelina but soon gave in to her better side. “Here, let me button that,” she said, her worry for him still alive and kicking as her fingers worked. “I’ll drive, you stubborn man; but promise me you won’t provoke anybody.”

He headed, wincing, for the phone. “Who can we call? Who do we know who’s on our side?”

“Come on, Carver. Promise me that much.”

“Can’t promise what I don’t know for sure. My word’s worth more than that, especially with you. Look, I’ll do my best, okay? Now who?” The headset rested impatiently in his hand, green buttons glowing, its dial tone distant in the earpiece.

“Um. I don’t know. Calvin DeSario. Sarah.”

“Who else?”

She brightened. “Dawn Fleischer.”

“Right.” He found her in the phone book, punched the numbers in, three rings, then the answering machine kicked in. “She’s not there. Should I leave a message?”

“I don’t know. Yes. And tell her to call others.”

He did. He kept it brief, feeling the urgency build, the probable futility of what he was about. They were far greater in number, the disaffected, than those who’d clung to their angels. And the latter were more likely to have closeted themselves like Sarah and Calvin than to proclaim the truth in the face of certain and unnecessary ridicule and humiliation, as Dawn had done at least within her own family. “Done,” he said, hanging up. “Let’s go.”

The walk to the garage seemed an eternity—a pretense at mere minor discomfort, while inside, his body launched into an odyssey of outrage and protest. But they arrived, and Mindy helped with the seatbelt, and he lulled his body with the lie that, no, he’d never move again, he’d stay in this seat until he was all better, and that seemed to ease his suffering. But nothing could ease his foreboding that the afternoon held terrible torment indeed for Ted Jameson and his family and friends—and that made his foot stiffen and press ineffectually against the floorboard, a phantom accelerator that did nothing to add speed to Mindy’s Audi but everything to raise both Carver’s blood pressure and the gentle ire of his angel.

*****

Maybe Dad had dragged him along, despite the debacle at the gazebo, because he’d told him he preferred to stay home with Mom. But he suspected, and his suspicion grew to a certainty as his father railed in the car, that what was about to befall Ted Jameson was to serve as an object lesson to him, that his father fully expected the unnamed ills to come to shock his younger son out of his supposed enthrallment and wake him to his duties as a DeSario. He pulled the station wagon over onto the grass, swearing at the media presence and prematurely slamming the gearshift into P so that they jerked to a stop. “Out,” he ordered, and Calvin obeyed.

Walking down Mariposite past cars and pickup trucks parked higglety-pigglety helter-skelter, his father said, “Ain’t gonna be pretty, what you see, but it’s gonna stop the madness, that I assure you,” and Calvin’s fizzy lady, mesh of slate-gray bubbles in the overcast afternoon air, said, Only endure, Calvin. Observe. Be ready.

People were milling uncertainly, clumps and clusters here and there seeking a center. They perked up when, bit by bit and then all at once, they spied his father walking down the road. But there followed an abrupt shift in the mood of the crowd, and neither Calvin nor his father knew why until five squad cars passed them in silent impressive array, the sheriff and the mayor in the lead car with the mayor’s husband riding in the back seat.

“Trust Sheriff Porter and Madame Screw-Me-in-the-Park to queer the deal. Fucking bunch of buffoons. Well we’ll just see who’s in control here.”

The crowd had been poised to coalesce around his dad, but now, while some fell back, more glared at the cruisers as they passed and turned their attention again to the man who’d called them there. Calvin saw angels in the air but not many: So close he could almost hear them arguing were Dawn Fleischer and her parents, Dawn’s fleecy young man of an angel confiding at her ear as her apoplectic father did his worst to hide his rage from public ears and her mother clung horrified to her husband’s arm. Near the driveway, Len Frome had an arm around Patti Singer. Len’s head was cocked to pay heed to his pink-faced, shock-blonded wraith of an angel, who knelt in the air like the White-Rock lady and cupped a hand between her mouth and his ear, as if her secrets were too precious to be spoken aloud. There were a scattering of other companions, maybe half a dozen, but Calvin was too shocked at Patti’s clear defection from his brother and at Len’s boldness, particularly since Mike and his friends huddled in front of the house not thirty yards away. But then he saw that Joey Russo was weighing a rock in one hand, that his brother’s hands too held rocks while his killer’s-eyes darkly contemplated the slow approach of the cruisers. Richie Feit, Mike’s rival for the top spot, hefted his rock from hand to hand, said something to which Mike sneered back a reply without his eyes leaving the cop cars, which were almost upon them; and then Richie flipped him the bird and hauled back his impatient arm and let fly like a rookie pitcher. The shatter of glass jagged Calvin to the heart, a perverse if momentary ecstasy overshadowed by wave after wave of horror at the outrage and violation of Richie’s deed. Onlookers were galvanized into approval and hints of dismay. His father, striding forward, raised both fists high and gave a war whoop; faces coming toward them wore looks of elation and hatred. Calvin expected to see Richie Feit turn and flee past the media vans into the forest, but the young tough stood his ground, watched the two deputies leap out of the second car, let them yank his arms behind his back, cuff him, hustle him toward the car, shove him into the back seat, and slam the door on him.

Macho defiance. He may just have unseated Mike.

“Right. Only kids run away.” Calvin said it low but he needn’t have bothered. His father had broken free like a football player returning in triumph from an end run—as if he were the one who had cast the first stone. Smatters of glass lay on the bushes beneath the picture window like cracked glaze. Nearby stood, incredibly, the man whom his father and brother had beat up this afternoon, bruised but determined, his golden guardian with him, and his lady and her guardian, and his son Tom.

Calvin sensed commotion from the house. Abruptly the door opened, and out walked T. E. Jameson himself onto the front stoop with the white wood railing. His face flaring with anger, his angel towering tall and strong beside him, he ranted against the crowd; but even as Calvin, guided by his guardian, slipped through tightly-packed bodies closer to the house, he could not hear the man for the sustained volley of boos and catcalls that greeted him. Microphones had been duct-taped to the railing, but if they picked up any of Jameson’s words, they fed them into the white vans and out along the airwaves, not into the crowd. Calvin emerged near Carver Haskell, who did his best to smile at him; Calvin gestured apology for the gazebo, to which the poor bruised man replied with not-your-fault hand signals before turning his attention to the vilified author.

The sheriff and his deputy had worked their way, the mayor and her husband in tow, to the stoop. He carried a bullhorn in one hand. Now, as he climbed the steps toward Mister Jameson, he raised it. “You people go on home. We have the situation under control.”

Someone near Calvin cupped his hands around his mouth to call out, “GIVE-US-THAT-SON-OF-A-BITCH!” It was a long hooted vowel, whose consonantal breakup was scarcely to be discerned for the solid core of outrage which propelled it over the general roil of sound. Like a drunken lumbering pachyderm, the crowd surged and swelled at Calvin’s back, drawing energy from the shouting man’s hatred.

“I’m placing Jameson under arrest. He will be taken into custody.” The mayor prodded him from behind, and he angled back from the bullhorn to hear what she had to say. She was gesturing to Mister Jameson, who was paying scant attention to them but stood defiant if shell-shocked before the whetstoned edge of unruliness pressing upon him from below. Nodding, the sheriff brought his face back to the bullhorn, and, looking more toward the crowd than toward the man he was arresting, said, “Ted Jameson, in the name of the good citizens of Auroville, I am placing you under arrest for disturbing the peace and conspiring against the public good.”

What the sheriff was saying snapped Ward’s grampa out of his shock—or maybe just redirected it, Calvin couldn’t tell. He said something to the sheriff which the bullhorn picked up at quarter-volume. “I’m disturbing the peace? Where do you—?”

“You have the right to an attorney and the right to remain silent—”

“Do I have the right to a toothbrush and my shaving kit?” Mister Jameson asked bitterly.

The sheriff looked over at Mayor Cosgrove, who shook her head. Then he said, “The mayor and I shall escort you into your home for the purpose of retrieving your personal effects, after which you will be driven to the county jail for arraignment tomorrow. Officer Blake,” he said to the nearest cop down below, “come up here and supervise the orderly dispersal of these good folks.”

The mayor, clearly angered at being countermanded so casually and so openly, snatched the bullhorn from Sheriff Porter’s hand. He shrugged and led Ward’s grampa off into the house, his deputy trailing behind and Mister Jameson’s guardian penetrating the brick facade like shampoo sinking into carpet. Her husband and his beautiful angel reached the stoop as she began to speak. “We’ve got him and we’re going to see that justice is served. Ted Jameson has done this city a disservice—I know it, you know it, and let me tell you he is going to feel the full retribution of—”

“TAKE-IT-OFF!” that same man hooted. “TAKE-IT-OFF!” Calvin’s dad, over near the garage, took up the chant, and Calvin blushed at the spectacle he made, a dressed baboon stirring up his friends and trying to shape the crowd into the image of his own discontent.

Not your fault, and not entirely his, she fizzed in refreshment above him, and though he knew she was right he felt shame nonetheless.

The mayor, looking hurt and lost, huffed at the crowd and shoved the bullhorn at Officer Blake who was pistoning up the stairs. Then she hustled her husband inside Ward’s house and vanished. The deputy began ordering people back to their cars and trucks, and despite his dad’s efforts to keep the crowd riled, Calvin could sense the bloodlust had started to seep out of them at the edges. The presence of the media may have had something to do with that, or maybe the simple fact of Mister Jameson’s arrest, though lots of people, from what he overheard, planned to linger on until they had the satisfaction of seeing him driven away in the sheriff’s car, cuffs on his wrists, jeers and shaken fists at the rolled-up windows as he passed.

Calvin maneuvered toward his father, but by the time he wormed his way through the crowd, his old man had moved off toward the bend in the road with Lyle and a few others to huddle over strategy. Officer Blake had unintelligible things to say over the bullhorn, well-nigh ignored by most of the crowd; they’d come for blood and they weren’t about to leave without seeing some, even if it turned out to be their own. There was a scuffle off to Calvin’s right, but his attention was drawn toward the driveway where Mike had retreated with his buddies to regroup and where he glanced darkly toward the commotion, stepping back now from their huddle and wheeling toward the house. Mike paused a bare second and then his arm came up and Calvin saw the rock in his hand. Redemption. He’d be damned if Richie Feit came out of this with a crown on his head. He’d at least match his deed and bear the same punishment.

But angel movement enlightened the air beyond his big brother, a shock of blond hair, a pink face—and Len Frome rushed in from nowhere, stopping the arm at the crook of a leather elbow. Calvin drew closer as they skirmished, his fizzy lady urging it upon him. Mike tried a rock-swipe at Len’s face, but Len ducked under it, diving in low to land Mike on his ass and into a fevered bout of close wrestling on the oil-stained concrete. The gang members held back, oblivious to Len’s vivid guardian, whom Calvin heard relay quick hints to her charge. They circled like dumb cattle, ignored Patti distraught by the garage, concentrating upon their leader’s fortunes instead.

Russo’s hand.

The fizz of her voice had hardly died when Calvin saw Joey Russo tug open the silver scar of a slashed zipper in his leather jacket and slip out a wrench, casual, no cop’s eyes beading toward him, most of it kept hidden along his palm and his inner wrist, just the dull-gray head for now beyond his fingers as he circled with the others. Calvin found himself closing on his brother’s second-in-command, shocked at the injury Russo intended to inflict upon Len Frome and stunned too at how much, only days ago, he had admired and looked up to Joey Russo. Calvin shot in and straight-armed Russo in his shiny leather back as his arm rose, hooking a booted ankle out from under him for good measure. The wrench flew; it clattered across concrete. Russo plowed into the fighters, and Calvin saw that Mike had seen what he’d done, his dark bruised face giving him a look from out of the skirmish; and Calvin took off back in the direction he’d come from, Russo fumbling for him an instant too late, his “You little shit!” topped by Mike’s “Leave him to me!” as his big brother scrabbled off Frome and joined Russo’s chase after him.

This way! He ducked, he dodged, scraping along the concrete facing just below where Officer Blake was trying to keep order. The front door disgorged the deputy who’d followed the sheriff in; he’d apparently seen or heard the outbreak of fistfights from within and had come out now to help quell the disturbances. He yelled at Calvin and his two pursuers to halt, but Calvin ignored him, and guessed, from the whipwhip of leather and the stream of obscenities behind him, that Russo and Mike had done the same. If the press of people hadn’t been so great, if he could have put on a burst of speed, he might have gotten away. But Russo snagged him near the bushes and fell on him, fisting hair tight in his hand and slamming Calvin’s head against hard earth. “I’ll kill you!” he said, his face so close Calvin could see the raging red volcanoes of his zits, the fizzy lady bubbling in anguish just behind him. But then Russo crushed into him from above and was tumbled off, “Get the fuck off my brother!” and there was Mike, who shoved Joey Russo away off into the crowd and then pinned his brother down and harrowed him with fist and open hand. “Fucking shitwad, I oughta roll your face in this glass, cut it to ribbons, reach in and wring the crap out of your brains.” He tried to protect his face from blows, but Mike batted his hands away or held them by the wrists while his free fist draped a new layer of punishment over their father’s efforts of the previous night.

A wrecking-ball of fists swept without warning into the side of his brother’s head, and he was suddenly free, staring up into glass-laden bushes to his left and a tall assailant—Tom Haskell—coming down on Mike to his right. “You fucking slimeball,” he shouted, striking blow after blow. “You like beating people up? Here’s a fistful of your own medicine. Swallow hard.”

“Don’t, mister. Please?” Calvin pleaded. But the man’s tie jinged and jerked over Mike’s chest as the rain of knuckles fell like a heavy downpour. His brother was in a bad way and getting worse.

“Knuckle-punched my dad.” A strand of hair came free over his brow, levering down to the rhythm of his punches. “Almost killed him. Let’s see how you like it.”

Your father!

Calvin looked up. Through the fizz, his dad wielded a long thick knobby branch, poised to strike. “Dad, no!”

Tom Haskell swung around, eyes widening. What would have been a blinding faceful of oak turned into something else as the branch stuck fast in the air behind Calvin’s dad. It was the drunk with the golden guardian, gripping the branch from behind and delivering a vicious kick to the attacker’s left ankle. “Son-of-a-bitch!” yowled his dad, wheeling on the wincing man, whose hand appeared to be gashed from the vain attempt to wrest the branch from his father. But Tom Haskell sprang off Mike, who moaned and rolled on the ground, incapacitated, and leaped onto Calvin’s father’s back before he could lay a hand on the drunk guy. A blow to the kidney and his dad went to his knees. This Tom Haskell was riled and riled bad, and he paid no heed to Calvin’s pleading, nor to his own father’s, nor at last to the victim himself for mercy. He drubbed and thumped and pummeled him without let, until the cops dragged him off and Al DeSario lay battered and bruised and bleeding, a long low moan that seemed to rise out of the earth itself. But Calvin by that time had fled past the cars and the patches of people, veering off into the woods to find the special clearing he and Ward had found once and to engage, with the fizzy lady’s help, in some serious thinking about his and his mother’s future: new paths, new places; prod toward counseling, or simply cut loose, bent for destinations unknown but free of torment? His angel’s effervescence carried him on, buoyed him up, showed Calvin DeSario new and sustaining promise that he delighted thereafter to accept and act upon, his own man from that day forth.

*****

When Thea ushered him into the house, the first thing Harold saw was Laura Keeshan arguing with his brother, her angel humped and chubby at her back. “My father is guilty of nothing, Sheriff, and you know it.”

“That’s up to the courts to decide.”

“You ought to be arresting the hooligan who broke our picture window, not to mention those people out there, all of them, trespassing on our property.”

“They’re being dispersed,” said Joe, though it surely didn’t sound that way through the broken window. “Richie Feit has been apprehended. And if you’re not careful, you might find yourself sitting between him and your father on a charge of obstructing justice.”

Laura opened her mouth, but Joy’s hand on her arm and her cherubic angel’s admonition closed it again.

“My things are out there, Sheriff,” Ted Jameson said, gesturing toward the treehouse out back.

“Joe, this is absurd,” Thea broke in. “The man’s no better than a common criminal and you’re treating him like royalty. Cuff him and let’s be on our way.”

“Cool your jets, Madame Mayor,” he countered, leaving Harold’s wife huffing and puffing with the sarcasm he’d so freely used. “This is my bailiwick. We play by my rules. Deputy Bermel?”

“Sir.”

“Secure the house. Keep one eye on us, the other on activities out front.”

Thea ushered Harold out the glass door and down the inclined lawn, muttering her disapproval. Joe walked in front of them, as though he were shepherding Jameson and his daughter and secretary—and two angels he wasn’t even aware of—toward the treehouse. Above, on the platform, behind sturdy wood railing reinforced with chicken wire, stood Ward and June, their companions an odd vivid couple behind them.

Holster. He marveled at how loaded with implication Caroline could make one word. There were his brother’s wide khaki-clad thighs swinging before them, and on his right hip rode—like a saddlebag on the flank of a nag—his .38 service revolver, the safety strap snapped shut over it. Just behind it on his utility belt were a cuff case and a couple of bullet pouches.

“You think so?” he asked his guardian.

Thea yanked his arm and gave him a look.

The crowd-roar swelled. Harold glanced back toward the kitchen. He saw Deputy Bermel turn his head sharply from the window and move off out of sight, annoyed.

Now’s your chance.

He and Thea drew closer to Joe, who was shouting up to June about running away, scolding in stern tones that made even Harold feel guilty. Jameson had a foot on the rope ladder and was poised to begin his ascent. Caroline glided Harold, smooth as a glassy stream, away from Thea and toward his brother. There was protest inside him—an olfactory foretaste of jail, particularly galling because the lovely reporter’s name, Ruth Crashaw, had been brought into conversation on the way over, and Harold had promised himself he would seek her out the first chance he got—but the objections being raised internally in no way hindered or slowed his movement, which was driven by pure informed instinct and which therefore exhibited the balletic grace and fluidity one’s finest moments of unified intent always and inevitably do. Both hands dipped toward his brother’s thigh, the right sliding over the grip as the left deftly unsnapped and lifted aside the safety strap. The butt of the revolver pressed into his palm and his fingers closed around the grip like a lovers’ clench, even as the upward impulse in his arm had already begun to slide it clear of its holster. Joe’s hand whipped down, but by the time he slapped at empty leather, Harold had stepped back and the weapon was raised and pointed.

Well done! Nothing prideful there. Just Caroline’s simple approval, to which he nodded thanks.

“What the Sam Hill—?”

“Okay, okay, now Joey, you just put your hands in the air. You too, Thea.” It felt amazing to be pointing this gun at them: The power of it humbled him; the breaking of umpteen societal, familial, and marital strictures out and out thrilled him; and the angelic rightness of his actions kept his grip unshaken and his mind focused.

Joe’s large hands rose slowly from his sides. “Come on now, big brother. What’s this all about?”

“Harold!” His wife’s voice shook with impatience and fear. “You give that thing to your brother this instant!” Her feet wanted to move toward him, but they seemed to be stuck to the grass. Her eyes were ringed with terror.

Quickly, Harold.

“Shut it, Thea. Mister Jameson, sir.” His Amazonian companion was beaming, and the famous novelist’s own face, startled at first, now brightened into a smile. “Retrieve if you will the handcuffs in that squarish case behind the sheriff’s holster.”

“Jameson,” said Joe, his head feinted partway toward him, “you do, and you’re accessory to whatever tomfoolery my brother thinks he’s up to.”

“Well, Sheriff,” said Jameson, reaching in to unsnap the case and pull free the handcuffs, “since what he’s up to is my escape, I feel obliged to do the charitable thing by your brother and take that risk.”

There was further protest and posturing from Thea and Joe, but Harold cut it short and marched them into the hut with the ornately carved door. Jameson closed the windows while Harold waved his two prisoners to a sitting position on the floor at one corner of the boy’s bed. Harold eased up some on his constricted breathing when the cuffs closed about Joe’s wrists, ratcheting behind him about the honey-oak leg of the bed. Ward, it seemed, didn’t jump rope nor have any great interest in knot-tying or lanyard-making so they made do with the boy’s bathrobe sash, a two-inch wide length of terrycloth that Caroline helped him secure about Thea’s wrists while Jameson held the gun and Joe and Thea, within kissing distance, reasoned with him and chewed him out, neither to any avail. For good measure, they lifted Ward’s desk onto the bed, Harold puffing more at its bulk than Jameson, who was in amazing shape for his age; no way now that his brother was going to shoulder the bed off the floor and slide his hands free the instant they closed the door on him.

Harold thought of running himself, of looking up Dawn Fleischer and begging her to hide him, to love him, to see her way clear to mutual and sustained openness in body and mind and heart and soul throughout all eternity. At least for starters. But his angel calmly and simply stated that he had to face the music, and when she did so, Ted Jameson led him over to Joydrop Heartline near the rope-ladder and said, “As soon as they set it, pay Harold’s bail. Use the special account. Doesn’t matter how much it is.” Then he was on his way up the ladder, a man with much on his mind and little time to make good his escape.

*****

If it had been him alone, Grampa would have endured the rigmarole of arraignment and trial and public pillory begrudgingly but with grim stoicism, secure in his belief in Esme and knowing that the passions of fallen townsfolk and of their petty-minded officials would eventually cool. But he was not alone in this. There was his daughter to consider, and his grandson, and poor dear June Lockridge, who had suffered and survived a crisis of belief, but who he doubted would long resist a sustained assault. And he sensed, Esme confirming, that the sweet taste of communal joy the town had begun to savor might be mere precursor to something far grander, something world-renewing if it were given a fighting chance. They needed, the three of them, to regroup, to find a haven, a place of refuge where they might refuel their spiritual stores of energy, discover a paradigm of human-angelic interaction, and re-emerge fully charged and ready to seed the world. He thought he knew where that might be—the heavens and blind luck granting them escape and evasion—and he also knew, given Joydrop’s recent lament over Luke Petrakis’s fate, where he wanted their re-emergence to take place.

Esme guided him up the ladder swifter than he’d ever taken it, more anxiety surging through him than he’d felt in years. His foot slipped once, but by then his arms had crested the rim and, despite the bloodsurge in his head at the thought of nearly having fallen, he hauled himself up onto the platform. “Ward,” he said, huddling with the two of them, “go down to the clubhouse and, as quickly as you can, pack your backpack. Three changes of clothing, your toothbrush, and a book. That’s it. And don’t listen or respond to anything the mayor or the sheriff have to say. Just step around them and get out fast.”

“But I—” said Ward, but before Grampa could urge him further, Timothy chimed in with Let’s do it! and that made Ward’s mind up; in fact it was Ward’s mind being made up. The hole in the balcony swallowed the determined boy and his swirl of an angel. Grampa leaned over to watch him scramble down the taut hemp ropeway, shouting, “Slow it down, Ward. Don’t kill yourself.”

“Grampa, what do you want me to do?” June was eager and excited. She and her wise-eyed Jeannie looked almost like mother and daughter, so unified they were, the same dark shine in their pupils.

“Climb down and tell Joydrop to go into the house on some pretext or other. If, as I think likely, there’s nobody there, she’s to throw some skirts or whatever into a small bag for you and hurry back here. You stay behind with Ward’s mother. I’ll be down as fast as I can.”

She nodded, said okay, and was on her way.

Callie Severance.

Grampa brightened. Fumbling in his breast pocket, he found the slip of paper she’d given him on parting. “It’s a longshot. She’s probably still pruning. I’ll give her three rings to answer.”

Go there anyway.

“Right.” He barged into the house, beelining through the sun-drenched front room to the study. He gathered the phone to his ear and punched in her number, taking care to stuff the paper into his pocket. Before it rang the first time, he fired up his PC, watching its memory-check tumble upward toward 8k and its autoexec sequence begin to scroll by, slower than he’d ever known it. One ring. He flipped open his disk holder and grabbed three blank disks. Thank God he’d formatted a bunch Tuesday. The phone rang again. There wasn’t time. This was crazy. He pictured the scene down below, the deputy even now probably on his way up the rope ladder, gun at the ready.

Don’t think about that.

“Don’t think about purple elephants,” he shot back.

Them either, Esme joked. At last a DOS prompt. The third ring. He jumped to the OEDIPUS directory, typed in a copy command, hit Enter. The disk lights blinked. Ring four. “Come on, Callie, please be there.” A list of file names inched up the screen. So damned slow.

One more ring. Then you’ve got to pack.

The fifth ring came and went. As the receiver moved away from his ear, he heard the click. He jammed it back against his head. There she was, the rising inflection of her hello like a hook to salvation.

“Callie, thank God you’re there.”

“That you, Ted? I was just thinking about you.”

“Listen, all hell’s breaking loose here and I need a huge huge favor from you.”

“Name it.” She’d caught the urgency in his voice.

“For starters, I need you to meet me again where you dropped me off.” The copy finished. He buttoned the disk out and inserted a second, up-arrowing to repeat the copy of all the files onto it. “I need you to be there in ten minutes tops. You’ll probably be involved in a felony or two if you help us, so please say no. But yes or no, you have to decide right now.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Bless you, Callie. You’re a savior.”

He hung up. The second disk was still chugging away. He came out of the study and U’d through the front room to his bedroom. He yanked his tattered soft zippery suitcase off the closet shelf and zipped it open on the bed. Socks and underwear went into it in grabbed handfuls, then three shirts snatched from their hangers. Shorts, cords, an old pair of sweatpants.

Switch disks.

“Right.” No time for second guessing. Three copies: one for Joy’s safe, one for him, one for Mindy Rutherford, just in case things really went south. Disk still in mid-chug, but less than a dozen files from the end. “Come on, you son-of-a-bitch! Move those bytes!” The copy finished and in two seconds he’d switched disks, set it on its way, and was headed back to the bedroom. There he threw in his toiletries, a comb, looking frantically about the room for missed necessities. Travel clock. The midnight-idea book by his bed, a felt-tipped pen clipped through its spirals. He tossed them in and zipped the bag shut, yanking it off the bed and heading once more for the study. A quick look around. Past glories, stillborn projects, notes and books and a forty-year-old set of encyclopedias. Let it all go. Nothing mattered but Oedipus Aroused and sequestering Ward and June and himself together in the weeks ahead, a gamble but a damned interesting one, even if it failed.

But screw your courage to the sticking place—

“Right, right, ‘and we’ll not fail.’” But Macbeth or no, if he lingered much longer, that gamble would never be taken. Third disk finished and out. He stuck it with the others into his shirt pocket, the tiny hard cases clacking together like turning poster displays. He shut off the PC and its monitor, not bothering with dust covers. Grabbing up the laptop, he hurried out of the study.

On the platform. No climbing deputy, just Ward below and Laura and June halfway up the lawn meeting Joy running from the house with a light floral-patterned valise in one hand. The crowd noises hadn’t diminished; they’d grown if anything more unruly. He dropped the zippered case to the grass below (Ward’s backpack-shield softened its fall) and descended the rope ladder with the portable PC bandoliered across his chest. Esme descended with him, a comfort in a moment full of more exertion and anxiety than he’d endured in an age.

He hugged Joydrop. “You and Laura look out for each other.”

“We will.”

“And see to Nora’s burial.” He faltered. “I’d like more than anything to be there, but—”

“We’ll take care of it.” Her eyes glistened.

He reached into his pocket. “Lock this disk in your safe. Give this duplicate to Mindy Rutherford. The kids and I are going underground for a few weeks. If we don’t resurface by October, you or Mindy need to send that disk to my agent. Got it?”

Joy nodded. “Yes.”

Laura embraced him. Topsy said, Needs to hurry, and Laura echoed that. “Quickly, Dad.”

“Take care, Laura. If things get vicious, insist on police protection.”

“Don’t worry.”

“And call June’s parents. Tell them she’s all right and that she’s with me of her own free will. They’ll hear from her, last week in September.”

Time to go, Ted.

He cocked a thumb toward Esme. “Always the nag, but I love her.” Then he took his suitcase from his grandson, asked Ward and June if they were ready, and led them past the blinded clubhouse into the forest, where, before long and far faster than he would have expected, the trees and underbrush lured them away from the clamor into a silence that held seeds of wonder cupped close to its breast.

Ten minutes later, June spied the pickup through the trees and Grampa raised a shout and a waving arm, ready to deliver himself and his charges unto the kindness of a new friend.

Epilogue

Saturday Morning and Beyond

The next morning, soaking in an outdoor spa with Dawn on his left and Ruth on his right in mid-interview, Harold Porter was in heaven. A handsome middle-aged Dutch couple listened in across the way, co-owners of a cozy restaurant-cum-bakery on the edge of town. A woman and a little girl were swimming in the pool behind the contrived outcropping of rocks where Ruth’s mini-recorder was perched, and other folks were inside, milling about the kitchen or sitting in chatty groups on carpet or couch, soft towels beneath them the only textiles in evidence. He had been hustled before Judge Balmer just after five on Friday, Thea determined to have the people arrested, Harold especially, arraigned and out of the public eye as quickly as possible; but he would never have guessed, not in a million years, that the house to which Dawn would drive him and Ruth—its lush, secluded backyard a paradise of controlled greenery—would turn out to belong to that same judge and his wife, Balmer sporting now naught but the broadest of smiles, as if he’d cast off with his robes and his textile undertrappings his judicial solemnity and all remembrance of the stern admonition he’d delivered to Harold in court the day before.

“So T. E. Jameson bailed you out?”

“Yes, my sweet lovely Ruth,” he replied, marveling at how lynx-eyed professional an interviewer she was, and how heart-stoppingly cute—there was no better word for it—at the same time. “His secretary is apparently co-signatory to an account for day-to-day transactions, and she, at his request before he left, posted bail. It was quite steep.”

She smiled and Harold almost had a seizure. “I don’t mind it, it’s quite nice, that sweet-and-lovely stuff, but I’m afraid I’ll have to edit it out.”

“I know,” he said, his left hand idling at Dawn’s wet silky back. Between them, their lower halves submerged in but not displacing the placid water, a dreamy Caroline and Dawn’s woolly guardian were contentedly entwined. “That’s for your ears only, not for your readers. I just want you to know that I love the way you look and I love how damned smart and articulate you are, and the aroma of your entire self just blows me away and makes me want to make ecstatic love to you right here and now.”

A little overbearing, perhaps.

“Jesus, you don’t mince words,” she replied, disarmed but not offended. “Funny what the sight of a naked breast or two does to some men. Besides, it looks like you might have something going with Dawn.”

“I hope I do.”

“He does,” Dawn broke in. He turned to her, caught a smile, heard her companion suggest it before she leaned in to brush a kiss against his lips, one perfect breast small and warm at his side and a submerged hand high on his left thigh in sylphid caress. Neither her tone nor the look in her eye lay exclusive claim to him, encouraging him to say what he said next: “I love Dawn and I love you too, sweet lady—and it doesn’t have a thing to do with your state of undress, trust me, but with how splendidly attractive you are in every way.”

Ruth laughed. “You really know how to turn it on.”

“I’ll bet I know how to turn you on.”

“Well be that as it may, Mister Porter, I wonder if we might get back to the interview?”

“Fire away, dear Miss Crashaw.”

Astonishing, isn’t it? She’s tilting.

Caroline was right. Ever since they’d picked her up at the motel—after he’d crept from the house to call Dawn and make his way to her condo—Ruth’s eyes had sparkled in the sweetest manner. It wasn’t simply the impending scoop either: From the beginning, there’d been more to it than that, almost as if his and Dawn’s angel-inspired frankness had led Ruth, despite her continued facade of good-humored unfaith, to the brink of knowing her own guardian. She’d refused at first to undress—no big deal at a gathering of clothing-optional types—but Harold’s good-humored coaxing and Dawn’s pixyish comments, not to mention the matter-of-factness of the dozens of couples and singles who’d doffed their clothing as casually as a hat and coat, brought Ruth to the buff within thirty minutes of their arrival. She’d been far more relaxed from then on, swaying like a natural goddess to the table of hors d’oeuvres; joking with Harold about his continuous erection (“Doesn’t that thing ever go down?”), the only one in the place and, from the way folks avoided staring at it, an oddity at such gatherings though Harold sure didn’t understand why; and suggesting that the interview he’d promised take place in the spa. She’d made light of Harold’s comments on her beauty and intelligence, but he’d witnessed as well a gradual melting, butter under moonlight, which softened the gleam in her pupils and gave him hope of reciprocation to come.

“The question of the hour, of course,” she said, “is the whereabouts of Ted Jameson and the children. Any idea where they might have gone?”

“None, though if I knew it I wouldn’t reveal it, Ruth of my dreams. I saw them enter the woods—at what point I won’t confirm until the police dogs have sniffed it out—but where they went from there, I don’t know.”

“Any speculation?”

He paused, listening to Caroline. “They went,” said Harold, “to the best place they could, to do the best deed they’re capable of doing, at the best time for all parties involved.”

“Straight from the angel’s mouth?”

“Straight from the angel’s mouth.”

She took a new tack, moving so that the water dipped and dappled about her, crooking her arms around the spa’s rim as if to say, Here are my breasts; admire them as you will. “These angels: Assuming, for the sake of argument, that they’re real—and I’m not saying for one moment that I believe in such things—I’d like both of you to describe them in detail, their looks, their voices, why you’re sure they’re not simply demons whose influence robs you of your free will, not to mention—as I’m too polite to mention—your sanity.”

Dawn laughed. “Good one, Ruth,” she said. “A zinger and a half. Harold, you go first.”

And he did, though it soon became a dual description, Harold speaking of Caroline melding with Dawn’s companion, her pale tea-rose complexion contrasting with the tan-dun-sorrel-bronze-brown ticking of his thick fleece; then Dawn chiming in—and sweeter chimes he’d never heard—to give a counterweight from her angled and enriching point of view. And so it went, running along their characteristics, their comments, their actions. And as he and Dawn spoke, Harold kept his eyes on Ruth, pert wide-mouthed vision of perfect grace and loveliness, faults and all; and what he saw, and what thrilled him, was the way she allowed their animation and openness to draw her closer to them, until, as she let her leg stray to touch his underwater and did not withdraw it, he could almost feel her spirit caressing the intimate place where his and Dawn’s souls already met, and he could almost see, like a suggestion of spiderwebs in the sunglow of breezed air, the outline of this beautiful woman’s most beautiful angel.

*****

Several days later, off I-80 halfway between Laramie and Cheyenne just outside of Buford, Wyoming, the regulars were mingling with the interstate spilloff at an open-twenty-four-hours-a-day Denny’s. With one exception, people’s spirits were low. It was that time between five and six a.m. when the night is finally over but the morning understands that it’s not yet time to commence, and not even a steaming cup of coffee can quite rouse the soul from its torpor or from the disquieting conviction that one’s weary bones ought to be in bed where they belong. The short-order cook sizzled widening pools of batter on the griddle, cracked eggs, and wished his mind were half as awake as his flashing fingers appeared to be. Nellie Riggs, one of three waitresses and looked up to by the others for her seniority and her quick wit and cheery disposition, felt about as elated as a dead helium balloon this morning. Loner in the far booth; trio of truckers talking loud but laconic near the front window with mouths that looked wrong without a cigarette; a small family from the motel next door, the dad’s hair still damp from the shower while he studied the map neatly folded in front of his menu, two dulled bleary-eyed girls whispered to by their scrawny stoop-shouldered mommy and nodding in return as they held their menus at listless angles; a few folks from town who blended in like the furnishings, they were so dependably there and so dependably deflated—some mornings were best zombied through, she thought, and this was shaping up to be one of them.

There was an exception to the general lassitude, and that was the loner in the far booth. He looked as stuck in languor as a dead fly in molasses, but that’s because he was used to hiding his feelings under thick layers of deception. He sipped black coffee, watching his wavery reflection slosh about in the cup, slick on dark sludge and elusive, unpindownable. Cops were baffled; he knew it. He’d noticed more cruisers in the last couple weeks, but I-80 was one long mother of a spine and his brand of twinge he’d kept unpredictable going on three months now, a dozen kills in that time, cops hadn’t come close. He’d shoot the truckers first, still their empty macho mouths, make them so much meat. Then he’d huddle the wimps toward this booth here where he could keep an eye on the parking lot while he alternated berserk and reasonable, blew away a victim without warning and calmed the survivors, making plans for which woman he’d take with him when it was just her left alive. Usually it was a waitress. This time he guessed it’d be his waitress, Nellie, no great shakes in the looks department, but she had a flare to her that got him hard imagining her twisting under him in the backseat of the Nova he’d inherited a few days ago making a bloody splash near Kearney, Nebraska. He stared at his cinnamon roll, drab swirly maw-filler whose exfoliating walls were brown-flecked like powder burns and whose lifeless dough, surely reflecting its baker’s empty life, made him hungry to deliver these dead souls around him from the prisons of their flesh.

A car drove into the arc-lit parking lot. A trucker craned his neck to look, turned back, whistled. “There’s one handsome hunk of metal pulling in.”

“‘47 Studie,” commented the one on his left. “Good shape too. Must be a show coming on somewheres.”

“‘S a ‘48,” said the first, glancing out the window. “Winged medallion on the hood.”

“Right you are. Man knows his cars.”

The third, a heavy-lidded geezer with white eyebrows, just sighed and sank his nose into his coffee cup.

Footsteps outside. Most ignored them, intent on eggs or itineraries. The loner checked them out, Nellie too at his booth setting out eggs and bacon and a plate of French toast dusted with powdered sugar. Spry old man, familiar-looking somehow, holding the door for two kids. And then they were inside and something swept the restaurant like a searchlight or the flourish of a magic wand. The dad with the map dropped it and gripped the edges of the table, as if he might float away. “Mommy, I—,” said the younger of his daughters, and then she laughed and bloomed, almost in tandem with her sister, though two more dissimilar angels than rose above them could hardly be imagined. Their mom put a hand to her mouth and their dad’s shoulders bunched as if to suppress a sneeze, but then he giggled and shook, and shoots of color fireworked out of him and coalesced in the air as his wife’s grandmotherly guardian grew from her shoulderblades and politely suggested she sit up straight. The truckers jounced in their seats, one two three, as if a burrowing ripple coursed through the plastic—and where three had been, six now appeared. From the kitchen a yelp of glee sounded, and everywhere, like mushrooms popping up in a time-lapsed meadow, guardians bloomed and droopy-eyed men and women undrooped as if the air they breathed had in an instant been enriched with oxygen. Nellie’d been ready to say, “Enjoy your breakfast,” but her mouth slipped out of gear as her customer bloomed the most amazingly sorrow-laden companion, a fresh young woman with fathoms of depth to her face; and Nellie herself felt herself extend up and out and in one breath freed the billowing manifestation of her finest urges, a being which melded the features of her long-dead mother and father and made her weep for joy.

“It’s Ted Jameson,” someone said.

People rose to crowd around them, and though they had heard or seen the news reports, they knew immediately that the reports had been wrong, that what they saw and felt at this moment was as real as it gets.

“Please, folks,” Jameson said, the impressive size of his angel making it difficult to concentrate on his words, “we’re just here for a quiet meal. Please carry on, give us some privacy; and when we’re gone, we ask only that you not mention to anyone that you’ve seen us.”

A few people had kept their seats: the oldest of the truckers; the loner in the far booth; the Buford regulars, with the exception of Gracie Stamm who’d grown up long ago on a farm and loved the pre-dawn feel of the place at this hour. The short-order cook peered out from the back, his companion grinning like a ferret in a henhouse, but he had one eye always on the griddle. Now the others found their seats and watched Nellie lead the infamous trio to a booth two back from the young family. The sisters gawked around their mom, but their angels kept them unobtrusive. Where there’d been funereal silence, an animated buzz now filled the restaurant. Nellie took their orders (they seemed to know in advance what they wanted) and, as requested, asked the cook to make it a special rush. She noticed the loner sitting with his meal untouched, listening to his guardian and nodding or shaking his head, his hands fidgeting with the tablecloth. “Everything all right?” she asked, and he gave her the oddest look, eyes moist but his pupils seemed deep with jagged glass, a weak-eyed Ollie North look. His angel, with one glance, nearly broke Nellie’s heart.

Twenty minutes later—folks feeling downright festive whenever a newcomer wandered in, better than Candid Camera and they got to joke across the restaurant at that person or welcome him to their table—the police car pulled into the parking lot. The boy, Jameson’s grandson, was mopping up egg with a wedge of toast. The girl tapped him on the arm and gestured out the window. Jameson arched his head but seemed not particularly alarmed. A slam of car doors. The rest of the place was abuzz.

On her angel’s advice, Nellie went over to them. “We have a back way, through the kitchen. If you hurry—”

Jameson dismissed it. “We’re not skulking. Cops are people too. We’re trying to keep a low profile, but a few days ago we discovered it’s best to take it slow and easy. You’ll see.”

Crunch of sidewalk grit under hard-soled shoes. Two young men in uniform appeared, off-duty, trading comments about something or other as they strode through the double set of glass doors. Then it hit them like a shout of sun, and they were like two best buddies at a carnival watching from out of nowhere a raft of red balloons suddenly ripple and flurry up into the clear summer sky, laughing deep and loud, straight from the gut. One sprouted a chimp, wisdom in its eyes; the other, a beefy fellow with muscles and an outsized pair of wings.

A hush had fallen.

Jameson, wiping his mouth, watched them. His angel confided something to him, to which he nodded. The kids sat quiet and calm across from him, the girl more worried than the boy from what Nellie could see, though both were a bit stiff across the shoulders.

The officer with the chimp walked past the family, a mingled look of wonder and determination on his face. His partner, grinning widely, followed. “You’re Ted Jameson?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” Jameson replied, proud as could be. “We were just leaving, but if you’d care to join us—?” A gesture toward where the kids were sliding about the curve to make room.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to . . . that is, you see what a situation you’ve put us in, I—”

“Officer,” said Jameson, “what’s the rush? You came in here for coffee, a donut. Sit down, have some. Let’s talk about justice and the law and what used to be called situational ethics. We should discuss Jiminy Cricket and what he had to say about conscience. Then if you want to arrest us, there’s plenty of time for—”

“Daddy!” one of the daughters shouted out. People’s eyes focused on her, then on the far booth where the loner had drawn a pistol out of his traveling bag. His face was awash with tears and his guardian huddled close to comfort and coax him. Even as the cops drew their guns, crouching behind empty tables and shouting for him to freeze, he set the pistol down on his soft cold sponge of untouched toast and slowly raised his hands in the air. He blubbered some incoherent something as the cop with the muscled companion rushed in to cuff him, shouting back, “Sam, from what he’s saying, we’ve maybe got the Interstate Killer here.”

“Read him his rights,” said the other, “then lead him out and radio in. No, don’t radio in just yet, you and me need to talk. You, um, miss—” the cop was trying to read her badge.

“Nellie,” she prompted.

“Nellie, I need a doggie bag for the gun.” The chimp was dropping quiet prompts in the cop’s ear, as efficient as his charge. “And you three—” He paused, brain racing with new perceptions, new notions, sitting uneasy amongst his more settled ways of thinking. He came in close. “I read your books to my six-year-old. She loves them. Take a hike. Do it quick before I change my mind. You’ve been handed a bum rap, far as I can see. Kids look fine. This guy,” he gestured toward the chimp, “is amazing. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I wish you well. My partner gives you any trouble, tell him I said it was okay.”

They left then, the kids racing for the door, Jameson cooler behind them. When Nellie returned from the kitchen with the sack, she was in time to witness the weakening of the angels and the general dismay that settled everywhere. But her own companion she maintained—wise enough, at that same companion’s prompting, not to let on as dismay turned in some to doubt and in fewer still to anger. Gracie gave a nod, her glowing openly-generous guardian the sole other survivor that morning. Nellie glanced caution at her, and the other woman kept her peace over a thick slice of peach pie, moded vanilla on the side.

One of the angry ones was the cop whose chimp, dimmed and fading, sank back into him. He held them all there, a mouth and a set of piercing eyes full of questions. Who’d heard what about their plans? What had they said or done? Had they hit the restrooms? He wanted it all. And as the waitress who’d served them, Nellie caught the brunt of it. No, they hadn’t said a thing about where they were going; not in her hearing anyway.

But then the wise androgynous being who, unbeknownst to her interrogator, anchored her said, Misdirect them.

But that would be lying, she thought.

No, her angel demurred, that would be doing the right thing, Nellie my Nellie my dear.

And Nellie allowed as how she did, after all, recall the girl, or had it been the boy, let slip that they were headed for a relative in Denver, or maybe it was a friend of Jameson’s, she couldn’t be sure. But she was sure, now she thought about it, that Jameson silenced the child with a look, kind of quick and piercing. It’d been while she’d refilled their water glasses, and it was the kind of thing she prided herself on noticing about her customers.

“They’re probably just now heading south on 25,” the cop muttered. She’d never seen anyone so p.o.’d.

“More than likely,” said Nellie, putting on her most helpful face and hoping with all her heart that the fancy old car Jameson drove had enough oomph to have taken them past Cheyenne by the time the p.o.’d cop, who had thanked her and was now on his way outside into the metallic rise of the sun, had a chance to radio in.

*****

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

“Ward, for crying out loud, can’t you shut Timothy up for a while?” Grampa’s exasperation was mostly put on but there was enough of an edge, and Esme—floating outside as if guyed to the car—glanced an intense enough look toward him, that Ward willed his better self into calm.

“He’s just excited we’re almost there.”

“If he could manage to bottle that excitement—and I hope like heck he will—we’d make a mint!” The cheer had filtered back into Grampa’s voice, and Ward nodded toward Timothy, whose hand was clapped over his mouth as he swam at a slower pace through the back surface of the driver’s seat, his eager eyes lit like votive candles.

The big day had finally arrived: Tuesday, September twenty-first, nearly four weeks since they’d borrowed the nimbus-gray Studebaker Champion from Callie Severance and headed east. They had had a few close calls early in the trip across country. But being wombed up, day after day, mile after mile, in this sturdy, smooth-running, lovingly maintained relic of an era long past had quickly begun an amazing process of transformation in them, a process that had immeasurably improved their chances of remaining free, even after those inevitable times they had to stop for gas or meals or lodging. They had sensed and quickly begun to savor a new unity, a fluid strength that built upon itself and made it plain, almost without words, that their angels while asserting more of what made them delightfully unique were also part of an encompassing, embracing whole. Folks they chanced upon—in small cafes, at early-houred filling stations, and behind randomly chosen doors at dusk in out-of-the-way places—increasingly bloomed less abruptly and far more intricately and indelibly than had been the case early on. Less back-slippage, they suspected, and almost no chance of being reported once they were gone, Grampa’s frank plea falling on highly receptive ears. By the time they reached the Catskills, found Grampa’s friends’ well-stocked and perfectly isolated cabin, and settled in for the remaining few weeks, they’d gained a sense of purpose and a serenity about their success that no amount of fear, uncertainty, or doubt could assail.

A mini-van shoofed by on the left.

Grampa pointed. “There’s the skyline.”

Ward took June’s hand. She was craning her neck to see, Jeannie beside her with the most loving gaze on her face. “Where’s the UN?” she asked.

“Not visible yet. I’ll let you know.”

“Are we gonna wow them, Grampa, or what?” said Ward. There was a sweet edge of frenzy to his voice, delicious and bubbly throughout his entire body.

“That’s the plan.” Grampa slapped the steering wheel and laughed. “Opening plenary session, we stroll right in on the force of our charm, trailing a small army of people who’ve come up to stop us but changed their minds, we wave to the thousands of representatives and the same number of angels sweeping out above the suited multitudes—and won’t that be a sight!—”

June said, “And then we give our speeches.”

Oh boy oh boy oh boy—!

“Sorry, Grampa.” Ward tried to shush his companion, but the quietest Timothy could go was a low drone, mostly drowned out by the steady hum of rubber on roadway. The New York skyline was a marvelous mix of lofty aspiration and geometric jumble.

“Yes, then come the speeches—June, followed by Ward, then me. After which, we formally request and are granted sanctuary, we camp out there in the General Assembly for a very interesting couple of weeks, and then we go home—”

“We fly home,” said June.

“I stand corrected, we fly home and resume our normal lives, though if I’m not mistaken, our definition—and the world’s definition—of ‘normal’ is about to enjoy a series of swift and positive revisions. Look there.”

“Where?” Ward strained forward.

“The Secretariat Building. That tall thin frameless mirror on the river, the one with the brilliant gleam.”

“It’s all tall,” said Ward. “Everything’s gleaming.”

“We’re too far away,” June protested.

“It’s gone,” said Grampa. “The road’s veering west again. I’ll point it out when it swings back into view. Forty, fifty blocks north of the UN, as I recall, there’s an underpass. We emerge from that, we should be able to see it fairly well.”

Ward relaxed into his seat. He missed his mom and he missed Joydrop. The two-minute call they’d chanced a week before from a Quik-Stop phone booth an hour’s drive east of the cabin had merely whetted his homesickness. “And don’t forget Mom and Joy and June’s parents.”

“Yes, yes,” Grampa assured. “Soon as our speeches are over and we get a break from whatever follows, we demand a phone. You two get to invite, my expense, anyone you like to come to New York. And I, at long last, get to call my agent, deliver this disk—” he tapped his shirt pocket so they could hear the hard plastic, “—request that he bring my three favorite editors and three freshly minted, unread copies of Oedipus Aroused into the General Assembly, to be mulled, marveled over, and bid upon by these three wise, powerful, and, most importantly, bloomed professionals, who will be reading it with angeled eyes, as will my readership by the time spring rolls around and our efforts here have started their exponential spread.”

“But what if my parents try to drag me away?” June’s hand tightened in Ward’s.

Grampa gave a concerned look over his right shoulder, then returned his gaze to the highway ahead and the trucks and cars shoofing by on the left. “Bringing pain to your parents, no matter how much assurance Ward’s mom has tried to give them, has been the one thing I regret about taking you from Auroville. It was clear from the radio broadcast we heard driving through the Midwest that this hasn’t been an easy time for them; and I hope they’ll forgive me. But for all the trauma and humiliation the people of Auroville endured last month, I have no doubt—given the changes you and I have undergone, the deepening and strengthening sway of our angelic power—that they, and Joydrop, are going to bloom anew, and that, looking at our situation in that new light, they will have no qualms about letting you stay for as long as it takes us to do what needs doing.”

“I love you both,” she said, “but I miss them a whole bunch.” Jeannie soothed her, her whispered words soft and gentle as a fluting brook from where Ward sat.

“I know you do, June,” said Grampa. “Just a few more days and they’ll be sweeping you into their arms.” Grampa turned south on Harlem River Drive. “Homestretch.” A new mood: You two have your notes?”

June waved her banded pack of three-by-five cards and Ward touched his on the seat next to him and said yes. He thought it strange how in-drawn he’d been up until the day June returned from camp, and now here he was—assuming the next hour ran as smoothly as it did in Grampa’s imaginings—about to address pretty much the whole world through its many representatives, roughly seven hundred from what he’d read, Grampa’s inflated figure notwithstanding.

“One last rehearsal?” Grampa said, only half serious.

“Oh come on, Grampa,” said Ward, “there’s no time and we don’t need it.” They’d been drilled, prompted, coached into the earth, speechifying out across Ken and Eve’s pond to rapt frogs and dragonflies. Listen to me, he’d say, do as I tell you. Later, when you’ve learned the tricks, you can ignore my advice, and trust Timothy and Jeannie. This isn’t a casual chat, it’s elevated speech, and yet it must appear—and be—natural.

“A quickie,” said June.

“Fire away, June my lovely,” said Grampa.

Unbanding her cards, she wristed the rubber band and fanned the multicolored cards out like a magician coaxing a volunteer to choose one. “Hiya, folks.”

Ward laughed.

“Good start!” said Grampa.

June eased back against her seat and perorated toward a rusted scow on the river. “We claim today no nation but the nation of Hope. We’re emissaries from that state only and we hope (no pun intended)—”

“That’s it, girl,” said Grampa, striking the steering wheel gleefully. “Give those poor beleaguered translators a collective coronary.”

“—you will offer our new nation-state membership in this august body—” Jeannie whispered something and June’s eyes lit up “(though it be September) and that you’ll then embrace and actively espouse dual citizenship, all however many hundred of you there are. Blah blah blah. The three of us came together—”

“Need one more blah in there,” said Ward.

“Nope,” June countered, “rule of three. Where was I? We came together, magic stuff happened—”

“Put that on a bumpersticker!” said Grampa.

“—then the bad TV thing happened and we did too many days of a cross-country car chase; only nobody, thank God, chased us. We hung out in a cabin, blah blah blah—oh now this is my favorite part—we did not, as the news reported it, hide from the world, but we hid the world from us, hid it so we could concentrate on what we had, undistracted by the raucous noise of its unbelief. Then, well,” June gave the cards a fast flutter, closed them up, and banded them, “blah blah blah blah blah (rule of five), it goes downhill from there.”

“Bravo!” said Ward.

“It’s ‘Brava’ for a lady, Ward, and well she deserves it. Your turn, my awesome grandson.”

Play it short.

“No fair, Timothy gave away my game.”

“I didn’t hear him. Did you, June?”

“Not much I didn’t.” He couldn’t recall June looking so beautiful as she did at this moment.

“Okay, here goes: My name is Ward, I’m really quite young—” (inspiration) “—And something else you ought to know about me, I’m very well hung.”

June groaned. “That’ll go over big.”

“You say that to the General Assembly, little fella, and they’ll hang you from the dome. And me’n’ June’ll help them do it!”

Ward went on: “The UN was young once, As young as a youth, These angels you’re hearing, Embody the truth. So let us stay by you, Oh let us hang out, And let us erase, That one last little doubt. We mean what we say, And we say what we mean, um, An elephant’s faithful, One hundred perseen . . . t.”

“Lousy poetry—”

“Rotten poetry,” said June.

“—but I guess you hit the highlights. Tough act to follow, Ward, and me without recourse to notes. Ah, this is the underpass, if I’m not mistaken.” The sky vanished and the river. The dingy, artificially lit tunnel curved rightward.

“C’mon, Grampa. It’s your turn.”

“Yeah.”

“Hold your horses, kids. I’m marshalling my forces—a pun before your time, I’m afraid. All right. I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” Then a rectangle of sunlight and river-glint curved into view. The Studebaker’s winged medallion burst through it, and Ward saw unmistakably the tall flat reflective face of the Secretariat Building, many streets distant and obscured some by a bridge—Grampa said it was the Queensboro Bridge—but no less impressive for that and growing more so as they approached. “Ah, she’s so lovely. The entire complex is majestic. We’ll have to hustle into the building we want—it squats in front, you can only see a curved corner of it—but when it’s safe to, we’ll take a tour. We’ll take many. But okay, the gist of my speech.” His voice went soft. “UN, my UN, faltering gal of my best hope, I was seventeen when you were founded; had a brother and a good friend and a whole lot of older boys who ran my high school when I got to ninth grade die in Europe or the Pacific. I lived as if I expected to die there too, and I was ready to go; but then peace came and you gave new hope while you fumbled along doing good, being ineffectual, but always holding high the beacon of freedom and human rights and cooperation among those who otherwise would have gone to war to bloody out their differences.”

Ward could see the UN drawing near, slowly, so slowly as if across the years. Beyond the bridge another briefer underpass vanished it. And then there it was again in all its majesty.

“Today, the words we speak don’t matter. I who live by my words say that in all candor. What matters is that you listen to your angels, listen to their words, follow their promptings, allowing the three of us to live among you for a span of days, helping you strengthen the newly apparent bond between you and your deepest selves, until it becomes so strong that your discussions and decisions are informed by it, and your return to your native lands serves to seed and similarly enliven everyone privileged enough to encounter you. If you will only grant us this opportunity, some small corner of this great hall to sit and observe and catalyze . . . Jesus, this is better than the speech I’ve been rehearsing for two weeks.”

Ward put a hand on his grampa’s shoulder. “Follow your own advice: Trust Esme and throw away your notes. You’re going to wow them, Grampa. I know it.”

Grampa glanced back, then forward again. He smiled, and his eyes were moist. “A gentle sustained wow will be sufficient. A silent detonation in the heart followed by day after day of glow and spread. That, and a convenient shower, will do me fine. Ah, 49th Street.” Turning off, he negotiated the blocks, taking a left-handed way about, hitting Second Avenue, then left on 42nd Street and left again onto United Nations Plaza. “Grab your packs, stow your notes, and get ready to kiss this baby goodbye.”

The next many moments were a vividly confusing time for Ward, so full of sense impressions he could scarcely remember living through them. Grampa jerked to a double-park, killed the engine, and sidled over to the passenger side, grabbing his suitcase from the floor and yanking the door open. June and Jeannie were out with the floral case in June’s hand, and Timothy urged him to hustle, his pack a drag at his hand. But he made it out into the noisy air and slammed the door behind him. The crowd buttered aside for them, their angels new and bright as billowing flowers to either side. Grampa, still strolling, put an arm about one of their early enthralled followers, and said, “Please park that Studebaker back there in a parking garage, bring me the key and the stub, or mail it to me, care of the UN, if they won’t let you in to see us. You know who we are?” The man nodded and stopped, a stricken look on his face, as Grampa hustled Ward and June along and the stream of crowd swallowed him and his statuesque guardian up. An official came toward them, stern-faced and perplexed. But then his features softened and a feathered angel enwrapped him like a banner, and he melted into the crowd. Seven doors lined up in front of them. They passed through the center door, spearhead on a human spear. A colorful needlepoint graced a wall to their left and Esme lofted by it. A wall curved in front of them, doors, guards looking hard, then melting as if they’d just realized a truth, holding open the doors for them to pass. A vast dome overhead, a man standing at a dais, a rustle of cloth and murmurs as all heads turned: Ward’s head bristled with the solid lightness of it.

And in that moment, the world began anew.

About the Author

From his vantage point in northern Colorado, Robert Devereaux attempts to improve the world a tiny bit through the magic of fiction. His first two novels, Deadweight and Walking Wounded, were released in the Dell Abyss horror line (1994, 1996). Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, made its controversial appearance in two editions, a top-notch, acid-free, illustrated hardcover from Dark Highway Press (1998) and a mass-market paperback from Leisure Books (2000). Two years later, Leisure Books brought out Caliban and Other Tales, five previously published stories plus a retelling of The Tempest from Caliban's point of view. Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes, a stand-alone sequel to his earlier Santa novel, came along in 2008. Robert's latest is Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice (2010) from Eraserhead Press. You can contact him on Facebook or at www.robertdevereaux.com

Table of Contents

Part I. A Confluence of Faith

Chapter 1. Love Is a Rose of Snow

Chapter 2. Flesh, Faith, and Fame

Chapter 3. Easy Love, Tough Love

Chapter 4. How Three Turned Into Six and One

Part II. The Blooming of a Community

Chapter 5. Monday Afternoon in Downtown Auroville

Chapter 6. Town Meeting

Chapter 7. Auroville Finds Its Center

Chapter 8. Awakenings and Losses

Part III. Imperfections in a Glass Eye

Chapter 9. The Rest of the World Takes a Peek

Chapter 10. Bubbleburst

Chapter 11. Auroville Fallen

Chapter 12. Goatscape

Epilogue

Saturday Morning and Beyond

About the Author