Page 14 of A River Red With Blood
“I did.”Kade gestured loosely with his glass.“How many of these people are yours?”
Louis raised the index finger on his right hand and brought it down once, sharply, on the bar.
“All of them,” he said.
And it began.
Chapter 12
In woodland that did not truly exist, by a lake that did not exist either, stood Jennifer Parker.She inclined her head and listened, as though the sound of Louis’s finger tapping on the bar had carried to her even here, crossing the barrier between the living and the dead as easily as Jennifer herself.
Beside her, the dead priest named Martin waited, unwilling to disturb her concentration.Jennifer Parker frightened him, and not without cause, but he had allied himself with her nonetheless, because a war was coming.He could have elected to do what so many of the dead did while he and Jennifer watched from the woods: enter the water that was not water, immersing themselves until, finally, it covered their heads and they were gone.It must have been soporific, he thought, since the dead did not struggle.Some even smiled at the last.
There was a time, not long after he arrived in that place, when Martin was tempted to join them.The water called to him.It promised peace, and an end to any recollection of human suffering.When, in life, Martin had spoken at the funerals of men and women going to their reward, this was a version of what he imagined.So why, then, had he chosen not to embrace it?That was a question to which he still struggled to find an answer.The best he could offer was doubt, the same doubt that had plagued him during his years as a priest.It was not uncertainty about the existence of God—indeed, when violent death finally came for him, Martin was given dramatic confirmation of the reality of transcendental evil in the world, and if such evil was real, so too was its opposite—but he had qualms about God’s nature.As part of his vocation, Martin was witness to the terminal sufferings of many and struggledto offer any meaningful consolation to them beyond the possibility of a divine plan, the purpose of which would only become apparent once their agonies ceased.Then, at the time of his own death, he endured appalling pain, and though he pleaded with God for the torment to end, it did not end soon enough.So it was that when he took his place by the lake, he heard the summons of the water less as a guarantee of eternal tranquility than a siren call, and whatever it promised rang hollow to him.In common with a handful of others, he turned away.He had never encountered any of his fellow exiles again, but they were out there somewhere.Like Martin, they were waiting; like him, they had seen the young girl by the water; but unlike him, they feared her too much to approach.Here, Martin had the advantage.He knew who she was, because he had once met her father; and if the daughter was troubling, the father was terrifying.
“What did you hear?”Martin asked.“One of them?”
They had not glimpsed an angel since the last of the three—a destroyer, a killer—had come to the lake, seeking to draw from the woods the girl so intent on keeping her distance.She was a disturbance, an anomaly, but so far, not a threat.Were they to construe her as such, they would arrive in force, and while they could not compel her to go with them—free will endured, right up to the moment the waters closed over one’s head—they could, in sufficient numbers, work on her so that the line between compulsion and impulsion was blurred, and she would yield, if only to make the voices stop.
“No,” said Jennifer.“I heard Louis.”
She had lately been visiting her father’s confederates, Martin knew, just as she visited her father.As a consequence, she was more aware of Angel and Louis than before.She was preparing the way, but it was a delicate affair.The machine was out of phase, and it was important that it remain so.Were it to be jarred inadvertently, it might return to true, and all their waiting, all her efforts, would be for nothing.What would happen then?Would there be a punishment?Would he—they—be damned?Martin thought not, but he saw himself being ledto the water, subdued by the whispering of angels, there to drown.
“Is he in trouble?”Martin asked.
“Someone is.”
Chapter 13
Angel muted the volume on the car’s sound system, silencing Michael McDonald’s voice.I remembered a music critic once proposing an alternative reality in which Lee Harvey Oswald shot Michael McDonald instead of John F.Kennedy, causing yacht rock never to happen.
I wished Angel had not felt the need to turn off the music.
I wished he had not spoken of Jennifer, and warnings, and recurring existences.
I wished the conversation, however overdue, had never begun.
Angel tugged at a frayed thread on the end of his sleeve.His sleeves were always tattered, torn, or about to be torn; like a life, like a heart.It made him appear childlike, lending him an innocence that was truer to his nature than any other aspect.At times like these, I felt a love for him as profound as any for my dead wife; for Sharon Macy or Rachel Wolfe; even for my children.What lay behind it, I could not have explained, being inexpressible in words, but that did not diminish its reality or the intensity of my affection for this man and his companion.It was, perhaps, an aspect of the male psyche that some women did not understand: to say nothing is not the same as having nothing to say, and expressions of intimacy may be wordless yet all the deeper for it.A reluctance, even an inability, to articulate one’s feelings, or their assertion in a different manner from the female, should not be confused with absence.
In his youth, the philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne had a deep friendship with the writer Étienne de La Boétie, but after four years Étienne died, just thirty-two, and Montaigne mourned him for the rest of his life.Great writer though he was, Montaigne could never properly voice his love for Étienne, norwhy he was driven to grieve for him, the magnitude of his pain increasing, not abating, as the years went by.Ultimately, Montaigne could only settle on: “Because it was he, because it was me.”Whether there was a sexual component to their relationship remains unclear, but there was desire, if only for the company of the beloved.They needed to be with each other, and what is love, but a need that gives at least as much as it takes?I needed Angel and Louis in my life, in a way that was different from Angel’s need for Louis, and Louis’s for Angel, while retaining the same complexion.Without them, my life would have been poorer, emptier.More than that, I’m not sure I could have survived the deaths of Susan and Jennifer without Angel and Louis to fall back on.They had entered my life just in time to save me.But why, from the start, had I responded to them without reservation, these seeming strangers, and they to me?I found an answer in an echo of Angel’s earlier words: Because we had known one another from before, because we had always known one another.Montaigne, too, offered a response, for this is what he wrote of his relationship with Étienne: “We sought each other before we met.”Had I been seeking Angel and Louis, unconsciously, unknown to myself, just as they had been seeking each other?If so, why?
Now Angel was speaking again—of Louis, and of lives formerly lived.
“It’s been happening more often these last few months,” he said, “or these last few years, but it’s only recently that I’ve started to understand what it might mean.I used to think I was afraid of losing Louis, which caused me to—what’s the word, ‘catastrophize’?Yes, catastrophize.So I was picturing scenarios that might never happen, imagining a life without him, as if I could prepare myself for the worst by exploring my responses to it before it became a reality.But all the time, I was hoping I’d die before him, as I was afraid I would during the worst of the cancer treatment, when I wanted to die, I really did.I knew it was selfish, but I preferred to leave Louis to cope with my loss rather than force me to live with his.And then it came to me that it didn’t matter: I was convinced I would find him again,or he would find me.It wouldn’t make the pain of parting any less, but it would make the years without him easier to bear.”
He worried at his lower lip.
“Except,” he continued, “I feel—as sure as I’m with you here, in this car, on this road—that I never had that sense of a hidden past before now, only the pain, because the pain was the purpose.And I think you were there too, just as you’ve always been there, but as a shadow, unformed.Then you stepped into the light.”
He studied me warily.
“Is this madness?”he asked.“Because if it is, it’s a madness I endure with Louis, and he’ll corroborate everything I’ve told you.He’s shared my thoughts and dreams, been visited by Jennifer, and reached the same conclusions.The question is: Do you also share this particular madness?”
I could not reply, not at first.When I did, it came as a release.
“Yes,” I said, “I share it all.”
Chapter 14
