Beauty. God always dwelt in beauty. Azra let his seeking spirit draw beauty unto it. In beauty he would find his guardian, his adversary, his angel who would aid and guide him. In beauty.
He waited.
Should he sing a song? Should he drone one of those endless hymns of clapboard Protestantism? Or some Kyrie? Some psalm? They seemed to help humans focus their souls upward, outward.
Oh, for a thousand tongues…
His voice was as primal and imperfect as the rest of him, more a groan than a song. Did nothing come easily to mortal flesh?
Oh, for a thousand tongues, to sing My great Redeemer’s praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace!
The sound only brought him back to the ringing coldness of the cell and the pulpy pointlessness of his body. He let it echo away into silence and held wide his wounded soul and waited.
Silence.
Not silence, but the phlegmy sawing of lungs and the dull thud of a heart that cannot be willed to cease and the ragged thoughts of a racing mind condemned to sense and sense and sense. The body was loud. Bladders emptied and filled. Valves fluttered open and closed. Glands oozed in silent ignominy. The human body was no more than a loud coalition of mollusks, pulsing and squirting in constant concert. To never have silence. To not for a moment be able to hear past one’s own thundering presence to heed a voice beyond…
Where is my angel?
Beauty. God will be in beauty.
Into that welling emptiness came a presence – face, body, mind, spirit, all. She was beautiful in no standard sense, but somehow the lines of her being, the eyes, the dogged optimism, the courage… somehow they transformed the finite to make it infinite. They made that one woman a whole continent, a whole world. That woman. No angel, she, but a police officer. A Catholic. Donna.
What is it she always says? Mother of God? She could well be. She could well be.
Suddenly he was not alone. He felt her presence, her straightforward and all-seeing presence there with him in the dark. She knew about him. She had hunted him down. She lived because he could not bear to let her die. Now he lived because she could not bear to let him die.
Yes, here was his angel.
Tears were coming. His shoulders curled inward with a soft shuddering. He was not alone.
That thought brought another creature into being, another presence. It rose between his legs, the immemorial snake of desire. He had known of masturbation, of course, for he knew all the mind of God. He had known of it, that it was done by nearly everyone, and that when first discovered, many believed they had invented their own perverse sin. He had known it was not sin at all, nor perverse, but part of the mind of God. Still, as he unzipped the fly of his prison uniform, he felt filthy and hopeless and damned for all eternity. The semen came quickly, fluorescent in the darkness. So powerful were the constrictions of testicles and prostate that he did not even notice the key in the door, or the door swinging wide until the unforgiving glare of the jail’s yellow lights washed across him.
“Put your pecker away and get up, Angel,” came the voice of a radiant young man who stood by the beaming hole. “Your lawyer wants to see you.”
She stood at her end of the conference room table when they brought him in. After the long darkness and the pervading pink of the walls, Counselor Lynda Barnett was dazzling in her skirt-suit. A riot of green leaves moved in the shimmering shoulders and sleeves of the jacket. Her red silk blouse looked too delicate and beautiful to exist in the same world as the heat-annealed caverns of the prison.
“Hello, Lynda. Good to see you.”
“Hello, William?”
“Whatever you want to call me,” he replied as he sat, the guards locking his cuffs into the tabletop. “I’m just glad to hear someone speak to me in a civil tone.”
She nodded tightly and sat. “You may not be so happy to hear what I have to say.”
His eyes ceased their smiling, and his attention flicked down toward the much-scarred tabletop. “Which is?”
She pulled papers from her attache. “You have pleaded not guilty. You refuse to let me use an insanity defense. You refuse to let me refer to the past that has been discovered for you. In two weeks you’ll appear, defenseless, before a judge and jury.”
Defenseless. Suddenly, that fate sounded terrifying. Donna’s voice came echoing through his mind. You’re human now. You have to live. In the dark dankness of isolation, he had felt the beginnings of what mortals call misery. Truth dissolved away. Divinity was only a disappearing dream. Humanity remained. “I want to cooperate. What must I do?”
“Good,” she said through an angry smile. “We’ve got a lot to do in the next two weeks. Let’s hope you can be as slick with the media, the judge, and the jury as you were with Derek Billings.”
FIFTEEN
Donna Leland stood in front of her medicine cabinet mirror and looked at her sallow skin and the rings under her eyes and thought, It’s a strange thing, getting ready for court.
As a cop, she’d gotten ready for court plenty of times, usually when somebody said the radar gun lied. Then it had been easy: cop blues, a braided ponytail, a dusting of blush, and she looked authoritative but human. She’d never lost in court before.
But how do I get ready today? How do I want to look? Authoritative and human?
Donna began with foundation, hiding freckles and blemishes and filling in some of the worry lines. Then she added blush to her cheeks. It was a sign of health. The women in Auschwitz used to prick their fingertips and smear the blood on their cheeks to look healthy and happy so the Nazis wouldn’t choose them for the ovens.
Is that what I want to do? Look healthy and happy?
Azra had killed again. He’d killed his bunkmate, his only friend. He’d killed to impress God, who apparently was a tougher audience than Jodi Foster. And what if God still wasn’t impressed? The next step up from killing a bunkmate was killing a bedmate. Eye liner. That’s what I need. It’s the right look – something to let the judge know how sad and tired and scared I am.
“All rise. Circuit Court Branch One of the County of Racine in the State of Wisconsin is now in session, the honorable Judge Sandra Devlin presiding.” The bailiff glanced around the crowded courtroom as though expecting opposition and then flicked his eyes toward a paneled doorway that slid open.
Through it stepped Judge Sandra Devlin. She was a small woman, further dwarfed by the walnut-paneled bench and the standing-room-only crowd. She seemed a caricature of a witch. Her skin was rubbery – brow, nose, and chin forming an ill-fitting mask – and her bright eyes glowed with caprice above her black robes. Judge Devlin slid the door closed behind her. She smiled pleasantly to no one, scuttled up the stairs behind the bench, and wriggled into her seat. Already distracted by paperwork, she waved the crowd to sit. They did.
Judge Devlin rapped the gavel and said, “The court will come to order. Today begins the trial of case number 96CF00132, the State of Wisconsin versus John Doe.”
She nodded toward a pair of policemen, who had just resumed their seats by the prisoner’s door. They rose slowly, opened the door, and ambled through it into a dimly lit hall of cinder block.
The previous hush deepened to silence. A few shutters snicked quietly, photographers checking for focus. No one wanted to miss the shot of the Son of Samael appearing at that door.
As in a Dickensian stage play, there came a formless shadow on the already dark wall. The accused loped outward. Wing tips clopped like devil hooves on the floor. A gaunt figure in a wool jacket shambled into view.
“My God,” muttered a man.
The utterance brought them all up in their seats. It created a high-pitched whine like the sound just before a cable snaps. The chatter of cameras became a cicada song. An overly tall, overly thin man emerged.