“It’s just a pen light. I use it for checking your IVs and debriding your wounds.”
She opened her eyes and squinted as they adjusted. Four transparent IV bags hung on stands above her – one holding a urine-colored liquid, another clear, a third the color of milk, and the last that of blood. Tubes ran down from each, onto Donna’s shoulders and alongside her arms.
“What is all this?”
He smiled, seeming proud. The lips of Shaytan curved toward his beaming eyes. He swept the light toward the bags. “That yellow one is hyperalimentation – intravenous feeding. There’s also saline, lipids, and a morphine mixture in A positive blood, on slow drip.”
“No, I mean, why are you doing this?”
His tattooed brow beetled. “To save you. I didn’t want to shoot you. I didn’t want to poison you, either. Nothing has happened between us the way I wanted it to.”
“You set all this up?”
“The doctor did. He showed me what to do. He showed me how to debride the bullet wound and how to empty the plastic pouches. You are doing much better.”
Donna tried to see beyond the tepid light that played across the IV bags. “Where is this doctor? Where have you locked him up?”
“Oh, I don’t have him locked up. The devil does. Of course, I kept his face and hands, so I could get more hyperal and morphine and gauze and such from the hospital.”
The light darted toward a wall of old wooden shelves, cleaned and loaded with supplies – more bags, cotton, knives, needles, scissors, clamps. Beyond it, just visible in the velvety dark, was a rack draped with masks. Donna saw more than twenty of them, each loose and emptyeyed. The doctor’s face must have been among them. The sight nauseated Donna, but there was nothing in her stomach to vomit out. There had been nothing for days, perhaps weeks. She blurted bitterly. “You envy us, don’t you? You dress up in our skins, take our names, make conversation over coffee. You’ve learned the fine art of socialization and seduction because you want to be near us, as close to us as you will ever get.”
“Now, don’t be bitter-”
“You were right all along, Azra. You aren’t human. Not even close. But you want to be. You wish you were. We still have our birthday parties and our office jobs and our hopes and dreams – despite you. That’s why you envy us. We live despite you, and you can’t beat us or join us.”
He was quiet, his feverish voice fading back behind the flickering light. “Yes. You’ve always been the one who knew me. You’ve always understood.
“But it isn’t envy. I couldn’t envy you: fragile flesh. Pain. Wounds. Weariness. Do you see this hand? Of course you don’t. My flesh was cut away. You see this other hand? Yes, it is still flesh and bone. And what does it hold? A faint, flickering light, because these human eyes of mine cannot see without it. What was it St Paul said, that we see through a mirror dimly? But when my spirit eyes are returned to me, ah, then I shall see face to face. How could I possibly envy you?”
“‘Nothing that is human disgusts me.’” She chanted the line as though it were an article of faith.
“What?”
“He wrote that, too, not St Paul, but Tennessee Williams. In one of his other plays, he said, ‘Nothing that is human disgusts me, unless it is unkind, violent.’
And that’s what you have become, Azra. That’s all you are. Cruel.”
“Cruel? No. I take pleasure in my work, but that isn’t cruelty. It’s artistry,” Samael replied. His tones were fervid in the chill air as he approached her. “Don’t you see? Humans are alone in all of creation. God is not on your side. Satan is not, either. No angel, no devil allies with you. No plant, no animal loves you. You are at war with all the universe, and at war with your very selves. You are different from the rest, and different from each other. You are a hundred feet below the sunshine, cold and wounded and trapped, clutching a tiny light that is destined to go out. No, I could not envy you, but I do love you.”
“If you love me, let me go.”
“The hunter loves the doe and kills her all the same. He admires her animal grace, her tenacity, her innocence – and he wants to possess it. Loving you only makes me better at killing you.”
“You’re insane.”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I used to slay without compassion, with only an eye for justice and poetry. But then you taught me to love my prey. You, Donna. And I fell. Angels, it seems, are forbidden to love your kind. But demons are forbidden nothing. Which is better, the angel that disdains you, or the demon that loves you?”
Donna’s lungs strained against the tight bands. “So, what is it, then? Once I’m healed, you’re just going to hunt me down and kill me?”
“No.” His voice was gentle, and he leaned toward her.
“No, Donna. I’m making you well so that you can live. Trying to kill the baby inside you was a mistake. It’s part of you. I couldn’t kill it without killing you. No, Donna, I’m making you well so that you can deliver the child. I’ve already selected the doctor who will help you. She’s the best obstetrician in the Midwest.”
“You’re going to let me give birth?”
His hand reached up to the flow regulator of the morphine-blood mixture. The droplets quickened in the tube. “We’ll all be delivered on that day. The baby will be delivered from your womb, and I from this flesh, and you – you, my darling Donna – will be delivered alive from this dark, cold hole.”
Already she was getting sleepy, and her sight had darkened even before he switched off the penlight.
“You’d never let my child live.”
“Oh,” he replied, his voice floating in the darkness,
“I said it would be delivered. I didn’t say it would live.”
TWENTY-SIX
The killing tonight is as it was before. Simple. Powerful. Clean. It’s the old angel days. I’d almost forgotten how diverting it can be.
For the man waiting for the L, it’s as simple as a push. But not that simple. I discover that he is a Caterpillar salesman, known for his aggressive tactics. He’s even now telling me of the killing he thinks he’ll make in Bloomington.
Death by southbound train would be perfectly fitting. The story of it will follow his generations. They will think of him forever, though he thinks of them not at all in this, his final moment.
A train is presently pulling up.
In one hand, the man lifts his briefcase full of pamphlets. In the other, he lifts his suitcase, filled with the clean folds of his wardrobe, his life. I push him in front of the train.
The really interesting thing is not that the suitcase and briefcase explode simultaneously beneath the untroubled shriek and rumble of steel wheels. The really interesting thing is that I use both hands to push him. I’m not even thinking about my stump, but I use both hands. I can feel my missing hand. Ever since chopping my hand off, I’ve felt phantom pain, but now I can feel pressure, too. His back was warm, his tweed jacket had a gentle prickle to it. It is as though, in killing, I regained my hand. This intrigues me. There must be someone else hereabouts who needs to die, someone I can similarly touch. The streets are loud with police cars. They send an eerie and faraway wail among the canyons of steel and glass. They neither approach nor recede but only suddenly arrive in a toothy rush and skid to a stop beneath the train station pillars. The police are bolting up iron stairs and along catwalks. The ticket woman is shrieking something I can’t make out.
I walk away.
The flashing lights send my shadow huge and intermittent across the huddled shops and immemorial foundations of the skyscrapers. Passersby pause and face the murder scene. Their eyes and faces shine like small moons. I walk toward them, in and among them, black bodied and eclipsing. I’m outlined in a corona of warning glow, like old times. We’re ghosts to each other, the people and I – they gray and watchful ghosts, and I a black and ceaseless one.
The old woman is at her window, just a tiny face above the sill. Her body is invisible behind steel and brick, but I know she is frail and wheelchair bound. I pass the young couple that holds the security door open. I walk up old stairs, which slouch in their center from a hundred years of feet.