by Aaron A. Hughes
For Madam Yes
“Night-time,
in this city,
lit by neon
lights on high...”
Darkening streets; emptying city.
In the misty rain of early evening, the stocky young man walks alone, and lonely. He sings an old, minor-key, show-tune to himself. His pleasant baritone keeps him company. It isn’t quite loud enough to draw attention, though there are few passers-by. In the artificial heart of this city, there are enough “sy-mets” - short for psycho-metrics, as the health professionals now call those who fail to pass the standardised testing - without attracting their unwanted attention. He feels he’s different enough; he doesn’t have so many friends, or so much money, that he can afford to be thought too strange.
At his own, measured pace, he moves through the city’s spaces and short-cuts: lanes, alley-ways, and untended gardens. Here: a derelict apartment building, no doubt inhabited by connoisseurs of the latest readily available street drug
(“lotus”? “iridium”?)
of which there are so many varieties nowadays. There: a glistening, platinum tower, almost phallic in it’s cool, clinical design. Others may obliviously traverse this city, but to him it’s revelation and, often, epiphany. Patterned shadows play across the pavement between one light source and the next: neon, laser, hyper-fluoro. The cold rain re-forms these lights, as well as those who pass through it, making people appear both more and less than they may actually be. Under his breath, he continues to sing to himself.
And he looks up.
It’s a habit of some years now. He searches for new and well-known faces, through the shadows, the light and the rain:
(“nightmares in the sky”)
That was the title of a rare book about them, an equally rare gift from his mother. That was before the doctors learned of the stealthy growth in her cerebellum.
He’s looking for the faces that remind people to look up; faces left there to reward people like himself, when they do look up. Sometimes, in the spaces between the cross-generational architecture of this millennial city, within a narrow strip of sky, he thinks
(prays?)
that he just might see a miracle.
Well, that’s what he tells himself, anyway. In this city at least, the “nightmares in the sky” are not so much frightening in an horrific sense, but in their ethereal beauty. Can beauty frighten? Perhaps. Faces - not of gargoyles, or devils, or daemons, or their ilk - but angels. A city of angels. A city populated by angels. Faces of a singular, yet multifarious, beauty that he finds himself unable to capture in words. He’s heard them well-described in some of his favourite songs from the old musicals; a genre now passed into history, along with the run-down theatres he walks by.
“Passing bells and sculpted angels,
cold and monumental...”
“The faces seem to caress your soul.”
That’s how he once described them to a lost friend. It wasn’t really adequate though. He tried to tell Kayba; his friend, recently gone underground, somewhere in this city. It was hard to describe that it’s akin to the love you bear for those you hold most precious; a mother, a lover, a cherished friend. They’re almost too beautiful to behold. Almost...
(well, that’s how they affect me!)
he thinks. For some years now, in quite a literal sense, he’s lived with his head in the clouds. He keeps looking up, seeking out these carved angels, hoping to see one of them look back at him. Not just to accept his admiring gaze, but to see him; to acknowledge him, to justify his existence...
(and, in my dreams, to speak to me; to tell me of mystery.)
To give his life a mystery for which he longs...
(to say to me: “I know secrets...many secrets,
the world is full of secrets.
They are secrets of passion and of beauty and of transformation.
I will share these secrets with you,
for you will appreciate them as so few others would.”)
And how he would!
Then, for plaster and stone to become flesh and feather. For wings to gather him in their embrace. To take him away. To take him up...and out...and into the night. Into mystery, and into an existence in which secrets are many. Far from a life of the mundane, the normal, the ordinary, the well-known. Away from the petty work hassles, the inconsequential financial worries, the redundant romantic failures: all things that should be nothing, but seem to mean far too much to him. Just...away.
And so this night, he leaves the endless mechanical jangling of the office comphones. He sometimes believes that they will never stop ringing
(and ringing in my head?)
He bids adieu to the callers who leave their abbreviated, sometimes cryptic, but frequently banal messages.
“Urgent.”
“ASAP.”
“Pls ph home.”
“Pls call yr mother.”
“Meeting, 11pm, Langdelair.”
“Confirming your new user ID.”
Leaving the supervisors who counsel you on “call control” and “calls per hour” and “no loitering in the frames on health breaks” and “do not engage the caller in personal conversation”. Sad, middle-aged, women who hold on to the little authority that they have left in a society that has left them behind. Pointlessly, they try to assert themselves over the “headers”.
He’s one of these: people who wear a spider-like, multi-point headset, all day. Linked to two virtual keyboards, tapped into the V-COM network, they take calls and relay messages all around the globe, and sometimes beyond. London; Tokyo; Sydney - former unofficial whore capital of this continent, until it reluctantly yielded its tarnished crown to this city - Melbourne; Amsterdam; Rajzna, the new techno-city-isle in the Pacific, named after the recently-discovered and still-enigmatic computer god; Paris; Rome; New Hebron, the international lunar community; Old New York; New New York... So many people with so many self-important messages, spanning the planet and its surrounding comsphere.
He looks to the prospect of returning home on an humid electro-bus, no doubt a fellow-passenger of “the man who does not like other men who wear ties”. He, who upon seeing the offending item on another man, begins a monologue of how the “clothes do not make the man”, and “those bastards made me redundant after 30 years loyal service”, and “they’re not fit to breathe the air of this city”. The younger man couldn’t agree more. Clothes do not make him who he is. Actually, he’s not sure what makes him who he is, because he’s not sure who he is. He asks himself, yet again:
(how should I act?
how should I talk?)
He sometimes feels that he would like to discuss these pressing matters with the tie-hating-man. Who knows? He may offer some constructive suggestions.
And so it would be from the solar-bus, down the service road, to his cozy, one-bedroom econo-flat. He knows he should be going home to the boy-friend, who is not often home himself much anymore.
“Working late at the office.”
“Dinner meetings with clients.”
“Weekend networking retreat.”
“Tracking my lunar investments.”
The same boy friend who said that he was attracted to people - to him -
“not because of looks, body, or money, but because of the soul.”
(well, that worked for me, because I was: a/ a mess; b/ a mess; and, c/ a mess.)
He thought he had found “Mr Right.”
(but “Mr Right” borrowed all of my savings for a down payment on his new BMW/Marinello hybrid car.)
“It’ll help me to be a mover and a shaker.”
(This is the same guy who hasn’t made a move on me, let alone touched me, for three weeks and two days now...)
(but who’s counting, right?)
(“Go home? Sure: love to!”)
He wonders why his friends ask him how he manages to nurture such a vivid, inner-fantasy life.
(I read too much; I watch too many movies; I listen to too many old show-tunes; I don’t get out much; I take my prozac.)
So tonight, like many other nights in recent memory, he walks the city, hoping for something - something dramatic, that is - to take him out of his life. He’s not suicidal...
(well, not yet.)
He walks. He dreams. He gets a stiff neck from looking up. He gets rained upon. Tonight is little different.
The half-way mark to the transit-centrex is the Hotel Empire. He always passes this way when he’s been on a late shift, which seems more often in recent months. The Empire has seen better days, but is still regal in its’ splendid decay. He likes it because, not-so-high on it’s crumbling walls, it has some of the faces he most adores in this city. Faces that seem immune to the grime, the guano, and the pollution. These elements are slowly diminishing so many of the few remaining classical and gothic buildings in the city, but have no effect on the sterile, self-cleaning towers.
He loves also the apartments, eight storeys above the city (he’s counted... many times), whose residents throw open the French windows of their tiny balconies, to let in the night. He often dreams of the beatific faces adorning this building, faces that might in turn attract real angels. Creatures who would fly to the open portals of light of the inviting balconies and, ever-so-hesitantly, enter, ready to share their secrets with those dwelling within.
Outside the Empire
(the Empire of Angels?)
there frequently sits an old man whom he is sure is an associate of the tie-hating-man. He calls him “Old Red Eye”, due to the ever present hip flask that he carries. He’s a gentleman, of the sort who, in this era of memory-fabric - which morphs to become any garment that you desire - still wears an archaic cravat and pin. He even walks with an inlaid mother-of-pearl, wooden cane. This device is in no form seen any more since the boom of the bone-in-a-bottle industry, and the subsequent elimination of all aids and prostheses. Red-Eye, like the Empire, is decaying with dignity. He sits there, each evening, in discussion with himself. His deep, mellifluous voice doesn’t actually articulate syllables, but instead produces a rapid sort of buzzing.
Tonight though, Red-Eye seems different. From half-a-dozen metres away, he doesn’t look his usual dignified self. His cravat hangs uneven and untied, his walking stick lies forgotten on the footpath, and the silver flask is seemingly more often at his lips than not.
The young man stops at the traffic signals opposite the Empire, and waits for them to change, despite there being little or no traffic left in the city at this time of the evening. All have gone up into their towers for sanctuary, or have deserted the city altogether, into the densely populated outer environs of this pseudo-metropolis. He’s learnt to tune-out the constant rumble of the city’s several access tunnels, which you can see in the mid-distance, like long, shiny, black worms. But you never know when some maxed-out yuppie in an almost silent hover-car, is likely to some flying by.
He shivers beneath his umbrella, and hopes that the wind will not pick up. This is his last, affectionately-named, “dumb” umbrella. He cannot yet afford one of the new smart ones which don’t turn themselves inside-out in a strong wind, but instead encase their owners in a clear, contraceptive-like sheath. He shivers again within his equally not-so-smart coat.
Across the street, Red-Eye turns to face the younger man, intensely scrutinising him. He rises from his bench. The young man has never seen him do this before. Slowly, purposefully, he shuffles to the edge of the Empire’s; corroding lace wrought-iron verandah, and tilts his head up to the sky. From where the young man stands, Red-Eye’s deeply-lined, yet somehow noble, face is illuminated in the red traffic signal’s ambient glow.
He sees something familiar in that look. It’s one of searching. One that is often reflected back to him in darkened, half-mirrored shop windows. It is a look of looking; particularly of looking for something, or someone.
In the next instant, another expression passes across Red-Eye’s features. It’s one of having found something; something for which you’ve been searching, perhaps for a very long time.
The signal turns green, and the flat, monotone voice of the crossing starts its six-language harangue of “walk”. He crosses to the Empire, continuing to stare at the old man. As his reward, as he mounts the curb, his foot catches a greasy puddle. His leg shoots out in front of him. Just as he is about to over-balance, strong hands brace his arms to prevent a tendon-stretching fall. He glances up into a face, and marvels at the strength in those hands. As he regains his composure, he about to thank Red-Eye, but is silenced.
“One of the air...
“One of the air...”
And continuing in a stage-whisper, almost in a mantra,
“One of the air...will fall...”
He releases me from suddenly too-strong hands. Cold rain trickles down my neck. In the space between moments, he’s no longer Red-Eyes; he’s transformed, and assumes the ethereal glow of one of my marble angels. The years fall from him. Stone and plaster become flesh. Somehow, he’s a harbinger, a bringer of portents ill, and still I marvel as his beauty, and at my own capacity for melodrama.
Out of the darkness and the suddenly heavier rain, a scream shears the fabric of the night. In this life, and any others that follow, you would not wish this sound to be heard by another. It seems to be pain made real. You could dive in, your senses could swim in its cold pool, you could lose yourself, and you could easily drown. Red-Eyes clasps his hands to the sides of his head and grimaces in sympathy, almost as if he, too, is in pain. With sudden and unexpected fleetness, he retreats into the almost cave-like entrance of the Empire, and is immediately swallowed up by the internal gloom. I turn to the direction of that awful sound, which seems to come from the alley between the Empire and the contemporary, yet infinitely less-stylish Hilton Hotelplex next door. It’s only a few steps, and I’m there in time to see a man.
I’m paralysed, or so it seems.
It’s not the vision of the man that has stopped me, but the almost-blinding white light he clutches in his arms to his chest.
We lock gazes. He stands six, maybe seven, metres back in the alley. I manage to tear my eyes from his, dark and blood-shot, and realise that there is substance to the light he’s holding.
It’s a mass of feathers, all interlaced together, to form wings. They give off a fluorescent glow, but then their surface is silver, and then again there appears colours, like the reflection of light on gasoline. They’re almost metallic, but then their edges catch the breeze and they ruffle slightly.
(wings?)
I start to sneer, thinking that I’ve been duped, which wouldn’t be the first time, when I finally notice a prone figure at his feet. The standing figure twitches. Gathering myself, in my best resonant, masculine voice, I yell:
“Stop!”
Away from me, he runs down the alley, still clutching the ludicrous feathers
(wings?)
I start to give chase, but, given - my virtually non-existent level of fitness, and an extra 25 kilograms that shouldn’t really be on my frame but which are - his fleetness eludes me. I’ve run past the figure on the ground, and realise that I will not catch this apparent thief
(“wing-thief?”)
anytime soon, if at all. Instead, I turn back to the figure lying face down in the alley. Again this night, I stop, dead still. It seems to be an evening replete with theatrical exaggeration.
The person appears to be a slightly built man, easily mistaken at a distance for a woman. (I’ve also often been mistaken for a woman, but for slightly different reasons, given my - how did Kayba describe it - voluptuous? - figure.) But the person’s sex is irrelevant. What assails the eye are two, long, tapered wounds along the shoulder blades of the blanched skin, which seem to continue over the shoulder, and along the line of the clavicle. Not gashes into the skin, but raised wounds protruding from it. It’s as though something has been cut, from where it grew, along his shoulders.
As I kneel next to him, the obvious answer almost stuns me into stillness again. I manage though, to gently clasp him by the lower back, and also in the small place between his shoulder blades, and to turn him over.
The face, of the sort that I have so often gazed up at while walking the streets, is living. It’s an angel’s face, and could be called nothing less. Full lips, fine cheekbones, sculpted jaw-line, aquiline nose, and long, silver eyelashes
(make-up?)
Then his eyes open. Pupils, like the wings, silver, with chimeric colours shifting across the surface
(contacts?)
But now they expand, until the whites of the eye are also silver, and then contract to normal (if this man can indeed be anything “normal”). His gaze is distant and unfocussed. His eyes find mine, and with a degree of concentration, which I see in his furrowed brow, he says:
“I fell.”
Thankfully, and surprisingly, my call control training - for dealing with the hysterical - takes over. I tell him not to worry, not to exert himself, that I will get help. Again he speaks.
“No...tricked...
“No fell...pulled.”
A long, ragged breath.
“Of the air...no more.”
Red-Eyes' words come back to me. The man shudders in my arms, as the skin on his arms, long and tapered, goose pimples. He is so cold and so light, not heavy at all. His androgynous beauty is so fragile, but I feel a physical strength under my hand as it lingers on his wide, defined chest, between his pewter
(body make-up?)
nipples. He’s wearing a light, low-slung garment
(metal? metallic?)
about his waist. It could almost be erotic, if it didn’t seem to suit his figure so well; hugging his thighs, riding low along the line of his pelvis, almost a second skin
(a costume?)
providing comfort and protection. His legs, like the rest of him - bar his head - have no hair. They are long and lithe. I’m trying to put this all together in my head, just as I’m taken by his ebony nails, when he speaks again:
“...am now of the earth...
“You. You be of the air...”
I lean my head closer to his, but of course I have no idea what he means. He reaches up with his left hand to pull my face to his. This closely, I see his skin is without flaw or blemish, save a slight crescent-moon scar above his right cheek-bone. His lips are the faintest blue as he kisses me. I don’t see his eyes as we kiss. It’s ludicrous: I’ve closed my eyes the way I do when I’m kissing my lover, or when I used to kiss my lover. His warm breath passes into me. I feel faint, but then my head clears. I know his name now, from the kiss.
Imtiaz.
That’s his name. I’m not sure how I know it, but I do. I try it on my lips, just to be sure.
“Imtiaz.”
He looks up at me with, well, I would think
(love).
I don’t feel worthy of this stranger’s gaze. In a moment, I’m all right. Actually, I’m more than all right. I really am okay. Well, better than okay. I’m reaching for superlatives. I can see who I am. I look at this man
(man?)
before me, and I’m myself for the first time in some years. I look at him, and he’s fine, too. He’s beautiful, and I’m beautiful, each in our way, and everything will be alright. And my thoughts are tripping over themselves, because I’m me, and I see what I could become. I’m so damn fine, and my life will be fine, too...
But, of course, it’s not.
His back arches, his chest pushes upwards, he draws breath through his finely-made nose, and whispers.
“...gift...to you...”
His right hand, around my neck the whole time of our
(lovers'?)
embrace, trails along my cheek. His touch is that of feathers, before I realise that it is literal. In his hand, reaching from the crook of his elbow, to the tip of his index finger, is a silver feather.
“...wings...yours...”
His eyes suddenly flare to full silver iris, and I’m frightened. I imagine I see fire, and the night, in their depths. He tilts his head to the sky, rain falling on his perfect eye-lashes, and sighs. I anticipate another breath. But there is none.
With an almost panoramic eye, I see myself cradling his body in my arms, as I kneel over him. After a little while, I lay him forward on his side, very gently so as not to hurt him further, even though he would seem beyond pain. My eyes come to rest on his shoulder blades. Slowly, efficiently, his skin is seaming together, zipper-like, as his wounds close. Not quite understanding what I’m seeing, I lean over to see his face. The whites at the corners of his eyes have re-appeared, and his pupils are now the brown that many see in the mirror every day. The luminescence of his skin fades, as through diffusing into the water flowing around him. No longer an angel; a man lies in the alley. I sneer.
(How convenient, how ridiculously fucking convenient.)
Over-head, a cinematic thunderclap breaks the moment, as the world comes swimming back into the sharp focus that is reality. Or what was reality. Rain pelts down upon me, a failed saviour. I can still taste his lips.
“Imtiaz.”
It’s then that I realise that the world around me is no longer the same, cold world that it was before tonight’s events. It’s not as dark, it’s not as wet, and the shadows are no longer impenetrable. I can see more. I can feel more. Out there, in the darkness, I can feel the trailing body-heat of the wing-thief. I don’t quite know how, although thoughts are starting to gather, but I know I have to find him. I can almost smell his rank, hateful, jealous odour on the breeze, which seems to now to caress, rather than chill, me. I know in which direction he’s gone, even though I don’t know how I know.
With a lingering glance at him, with his feather like to a compass in my hand: I am up, and out, and into the night of this city, to avenge an
(my)
angel.