So we would spend the day together, wrapped to our chins in indestructible angel-stuff - he in his barred robe, I in my black cloak and my hat - and clamber over the old messes, and talk about ancient things until our hands and feet got numb; and in the crackling freeze, trudge back to his hole in the ruin to unload our treasures and talk about who should take what. Since I went mostly for the walk and the company, he always got the best things, though I would put up a show of bargaining so as not to hurt his feelings. He would deal hard for dead, useless contraptions, and only abandon them after long thought and much insistence that they could be put to some use.
Sometimes we would be gone two or three days, if Teeplee had discovered a good big stretch of Housing as he called it; sometimes he would bring along one of his boys, but never a wife. ("This is men's work," he would say, with his chin out.)
He knew a lot of angel lore, Teeplee, though I never knew how much of it to believe. I asked him why all the Housing I had ever seen was the same: each little tumbledown place the same, each with its room for a kitchen and a stone place for washing. Didn't any of the angels think of a different way of putting things together? He said that if what I had seen had surprised me, I should have traveled as far as he had, and seen it everywhere, Housing stretching as far as the eye could see was how he put it, and yes, everywhere fitted out exactly as the angels always did, so they could travel thousands of miles, from Coast to Coast, and have another box just like the one they had come from. He said some even trundled one around with them wherever they went, like a snail shell, just in case they ended up somewhere where everything was not just as they required. Think of them, he said, rushing over vast distances you won't travel even if you have many lives, and everywhere finding Housing exactly the same, and wanting it that way too.
Now, how could he know that? Maybe there was some other explanation altogether. Maybe it was a Law.
One rimy day, in a huge place of great fallen blocks sunken by their own weight into the earth - it looked as though the earth had taken a big, a too big, mouthful of the angels' works - I found a good thing: a big box of glittering screws, as good as new. "As good as new," Teeplee said trembling with cold and envy. All the way back, he kept asking if I hadn't lost them, if maybe it wouldn't be safer if he carried them, and so on; and when we were once again in the stuffy warmth of his hideout, and I put them on the table between us. Teeplee ungloved one hand and dipped it into the rustling bits; he felt their clean-cut spiral edges, stuck a thumbnail in their slots. "A screw," he said; "now a screw isn't like a nail, isn't like tying something on with string, boy. A screw, a screw has" - he balled his fist - "a screw has authority." Then, as though the answer were of no real importance to him: "What do you want for them?"
"Well," I said, "I could use a pair of gloves."
He quickly gloved his bare hand. "Sure," he said. "Of course you'd want warm, good ones, not like these things." He raised his black plastic fingers and wiggled them. Why was there a star painted on each cuff?
"They look good to me," I said. "Indestructible."
"You say 'gloves,'" he said. "I've seen gloves compared to which these are bare hands." He looked at me sidewise. "Not a pair." He raised his hand to forestall some criticism I might have, and went to search in his other room.
He returned with something wrapped in a grimy rag. "There are gloves," he said, "and there are gloves." He unwrapped the rag, and laid on the table before me a silver glove that glowed like ice.
Will you believe, angel, that until I saw it there - like a hand more than a glove, like the bright shadow of a hand - I had forgotten that it was with such a glove that Zhinsinura had manipulated Boots, had forgotten entirely that it was a glove like the glove stolen from St. Andy which had replaced me with Boots? It's so: not until I saw Teeplee's glove on his cracked table, did I remember that other - no, more: when I saw it, that moment was delivered to me again, whole, in all its wonder and terror: I saw the small room, the clear sphere and its pedestal; I saw Zhinsinura slipping on her glove, and heard her say Close your eyes. Too many wonders almost immediately succeeded that one: I had forgotten entirely.
"I've seen a glove like that," I said, when the moment had - not faded, no - but passed.
"Seeing is one thing," Teeplee said. "Having is another."
"And I know a story of one like it, a story about this one, maybe." There was a place - a single small place, a point even - where everything in my life intersected every other. I felt my mind cross like my eyes can cross.
"About these screws," Teeplee said.
"Yes, yes," I said. "Take them." He did, slowly, surprised at my indifference, wondering if maybe he'd made a bad bargain for them. "Where did you find it?" I asked.
"Well, well, there it is."
"Was there, with it, anywhere near it, a ball - a silver ball, well, maybe not silver, but this color?"
"No."
"Are you sure? Maybe there was. Will you go there again? I could go with you."
He narrowed his eyes at me. "What about this ball?"
"I don't know what about it," I said, laughing at his confusion, and at my own. "I don't know. I wish I did. I only know I'd give everything I have to get it, not that that's very much."
He scratched his bald buzzer's head and looked down glumly at the glove. "It isn't even a pair," he said.
So I had this thing then to think about. For a long time I wouldn't put it on; it lay, stainless and impossible, amid my things, and no matter how I folded it took the shape of a living hand, though it was fine and nearly weightless to hold. When at last I did draw it on - it slid voraciously over my fingers and up my wrist, as though hungry for a human hand after long years - I took it off again almost immediately. I think I was afraid of what my hand within it might do. From then on I only looked at it and thought about it - thought in circles.
There were other things, too, to occupy the nights. The other would argue that it only made me want her more, and I would concede that; anyway, my reconstructions of our pale twilight dreams were feeble, we had marked too few. Sometimes I would lie with my skirts up working furiously with the useless thing and find myself at the same time shedding cold tears just as useless.
You really shouldn't laugh.
Third Facet
There came a day when I understood winter was forever; though there would be days when it didn't freeze and days when the sun shone, they would always be followed by cold and rain again.
That day had begun fair, but afternoon dragged the clouds back over and they began again their ceaseless weeping. Toward evening the drizzle subsided to a sniffle, but the clouds hung low and baggy with further business to do. I sat smoking, letting pile up on the inside of the concave eyeball a little pile of rose-colored ash which the wet wind played with. No, no spring this year; the wood was slimy with despair and chilled to the marrow. Not quite dead, not frozen; there had been little snow all winter. But hopeless.
Be thankful, he told me, that she wasn't there to go back to. She knew you wouldn't come back from Boots being as she was, only a poor cripple, not the one and not the other; not yourself whom she first loved, yet nothing other either.