One and No One
When the angel came to Craig, he was seven, squatting in the outhouse at camp. You had to flush it with a bucket of water, if you remembered, which Craig always did, and the angel was a field of pink and blue about a foot wide, with no depth at all. Flat beyond flat, like an edge to the world. Craig leaned forward and put his left hand into it, up to the wrist.
It blinked, or Craig blinked, or both—there was a gap in his vision of it, just long enough for him to notice. And already it was changing. At first, the blue and pink had simply swirled together, in the angel, but with Craig’s wrist in the middle it began to cohere. Pink by the wrist, bluer beyond. Craig’s hand felt far off, as if he had loved it once, long ago, and was beginning to forget. He made a fist, and the pink seemed to spread.
Craig wondered what would happen if he put his face into the angel. Was there anything in there to see? Was there even any there in there, for things to be in? Would his body forget him if he was away too long? And was the angel getting brighter? It was, and Craig passed out.
When he woke, he was nine. It was a bright October morning and he was in a circle of third graders in a yellow room. They were sitting on red pillows on the floor. He was sitting, too. He opened his mouth to speak and blood surged out, and then from his eyes, his ears, his nose.
This felt fine, or even good: the world and his body hurtling joyously through each other. To everyone else, it was horror arriving in the room. They all started crying. His teacher grabbed him and ran him bleeding down the halls, in circles, screaming through the school until help caught up.
From this, Craig learned that he should be quiet. He closed his eyes and let himself be carried. He let the bleeding stop on its own, in the hospital, and he mourned it in silence. He didn’t mention the angel to anyone. Every time he closed his eyes, he thought he’d see it there, living in his head, but he never did. His teacher sobbed whenever she saw him.
The events of the missing years, during which he had, apparently, talked and moved around normally, he picked up as he could, from the clues he was given. He learned the names of his new friends when they signed their get-well cards. What mistakes he made were put down to the shock of the incident. People were very patient. Day by day, his parents got better at pretending they had forgotten. They touched him as they would a normal child, and he smiled. He walked and played and went to school, went to college, got a job, moved to a city.
Two years. What had he missed? He would ask himself this now and then, as he got older and older. The answer was nothing. Those years had never been his. He had never been theirs.
What had he seen, there in the angel? Also nothing. But the other nothing—there was nothing and nothing, like the left hand and the right. That was something he knew. He had been right-handed, once, and now he was not.
When the angel came to Kristin, she was twenty-five, on a blind date at the nicest bar in Chico, California. There were three chandeliers, there were wood walls with mirrors on them. The man was pale and round and smiling. The angel spread across the top of her martini, starting at the olive, pink and blue, pinker near the rim, and then it detached itself and floated gently up and filled the space in front of her eyes.
The man was discussing gold. The angel obscured his face entirely, as if he had been all along just a voice and a set of arms, cuffs, a watch. He seemed to see nothing, and kept talking. Kristin opened her mouth a little, not to speak, and the angel brightened, and the man’s voice got farther away. She ran her tongue along the backs of her teeth and saw the angel swirl. She touched it to the roof of her mouth and the pink brightened. It is dancing, she thought, we’re dancing. She opened her mouth wider, as wide as she could, and the angel entered.
When she woke, she was married, though not to that man. This man was a little less solid, a little more tan. He was standing in the kitchen pointing at a cactus in a pot. She was wearing a caftan, yellow and white, and her feet were bare. It was a very obvious situation, she felt: the rings, the room, his face. No need to ask what she’d missed.
So she spoke. Life was a tunnel, she told her husband, and the walls were the same in light or in darkness. You didn’t need to see them to know they were there. He should close his eyes, she said. He should put out his hands and feel what they touched.
He looked frightened. As her words came out, smoke billowed from her body, filling her clothes, lapping out around her feet in rings. He dropped to his knees. White smoke. She felt held by it, cradled, even as it left her, even as it rushed out and filled the room. When she could no longer see him, when she could no longer be seen, she left.
It had been four years, she learned when she got to a gas station and saw a paper. Four years and three months and a few days. She bought sandals and water and a bag of trail mix, and when she went up to the counter the boy behind it just smiled, and she smiled, and on she went. She walked. She hitched to a city. She told the drivers—two truckers, a salesman, a teen with elaborate hair—about the angel, but no one believed. They laughed and laughed and let her out.
The days flaked off and fell, and she left them to the ground. Worked, begged, slept in attics and basements and under benches in parks. Every day there seemed a little less of her, a little less of the world, fewer days in front of her eyes. And she knew that one day there would be nothing left, nothing between her and the angel, and it would stand before her again, aglow with itself. As if one night all the lights in all the buildings would be turned off at once, and the cars and the street lamps and the screens, and even the stars would be dark overhead, and there is the moon. But it didn’t happen.
They met at the movies, a comedy about a serial killer and his mom. She was in the front row, napping, and he was behind her. He put his hands over her eyes and she opened them and her lashes brushed his palms. On a bench down the block, they sat side by side and told each other about the angel—the hand, the mouth, the smoke, the blood. They were at the edge of a park, and people walked by them and cars went past, and they talked with their knees touching.
The sun was down. A warm breeze seemed to blow in a circle around them, tighter and tighter. Their eyes, they saw, were pink and blue. They lay down together in the dirt and grass and went to sleep. She dreamed that she was lying there and the angel appeared and a little hand came out of it, a child’s hand, grubby, reaching toward her, and it made a fist. He dreamed he was curled up in her mouth.
When they woke it was morning and the other was gone. He was alone. She was alone. They called each other’s names. They went back to the theatre, they ran in and out of stores, they ran up and down the streets and stared into the faces of strangers, hoping just for resemblance. They searched all day for each other, circling out and out through the city and finding only other people.
And when the sun went down again the clouds were pink and then blue and then darker, and stars swarmed in. They closed their eyes. They saw the angel, just as they remembered. They opened them, and saw nothing. ♦