She holds him, pets him. The truth of what he has to say is bigger than he can conceive. His own death. The abandonment of his wife, his children. His mental and physical decline. How he will soon become a burden, a dependent, staining their otherwise perfect lives.
He knows that when he tells her, she will want to withdraw her name from the court’s selection process, that the combination of his news and Story’s disappearance will feel like a sign, and she will quit on her dream at the very moment when she is closest to reaching it. And he can’t let that happen. He can’t let his weakness be what crushes her rise. So he nods and holds her and cries, and lets her think that his heartbreak is for someone else.
Simon
They drive all night and through the next day, stopping for gas outside Plano, then again near Midland. Flagg and Katniss ride lead, looking for trouble, dirt bike engines whining at speed. Cyclops brings up the rear. His bike has chopper handlebars, and he leans against the backrest, nodding in time to music only he can hear. For long stretches of time the Prophet sits staring at the flip phone in its ziplock bag. Up front, Duane plays an array of CDs, mostly eighties metal—Dio, Slayer, Ratt. He recounts epic tales of video game levels mastered, as if he himself were a demon slayer or a starship pilot. He drives with one arm out the window, feeling the breeze, even at highway speeds, making the inside of the van a kind of rock-and-roll tornado.
’Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor
I met a girl so fair
Float Anxiety Abatement Center seems like a different life. Driving the empty miles, Simon feels like what he is—an immigrant in a new land.
Texas. We’re in Texas. He sees lawn signs for the God King, his face Photoshopped on the Terminator’s body with the words “I’ll be back,” a promise or a threat, depending on whether you watch that movie and root for the machines. They pass exotic game ranches and billboards for Christ. Nine out of ten towns look abandoned, junked cars surrounding run-down homes, western store fronts long empty, but the churches remain. Faith. This is the Kingdom of Main Street.
Though the language spoken here appears to be the same, the meaning of each word can be vastly different. What they mean when they say freedom. What they mean when they say equal. What they mean when they say fair. They sing the same anthem in this America as they sing in Simon’s, quote the same Constitution, but the words feel like contronyms: words that mean both one thing and its opposite. As in to cleave, defined as both to split apart and to join together.
The Kingdom of Main Street.
Lying on an Indian blanket on the metal floor, Simon slips into slumber.
And dreams he’s flying.
Below him the ocean sparkles. There is a fog bank ahead of him, a wall of snowy white. It reaches out and pulls him in. Blindness takes him. He can smell the salt air. Waves form below him. He can hear them crash against the shore ahead. And in the dream he feels no anxiety, no fear. His mind is blank. Dew bathes his face. He dips and soars.
On the tip of his tongue are the names of the angels.
Semanglaf, who helps the pregnant. Shateiel, the angel of silence, Abathar Muzania, the weigher of souls.
In the depths below something stirs.
And then he is over a beach and entering a city, moving through palm trees and low-slung concrete homes. But where are the people? The streets are empty. No pedestrians. No cars. He flies through the canyon of buildings, heading east—white wall, red door—but then the canyon becomes a hallway. White wall, red door. A dark and narrow corridor. Ahead is a door, half-open. The sounds of cooking from inside. He moves toward it, drawn in by a woman’s voice.
Protect me, O Dumah, angel of dreams.
Watch over me, feared Azrael, forever writing names in the Book of the Dead.
She is standing at the stove, her white hair cut to the shoulder, her back to the door, dressed in black, her frame skeletal. She is stirring a giant pot with a wooden spoon and humming a tuneless tune.
It is Israefel who will blow the horn on Judgment Day.
How does he know this? Or that it is the angel Forneus, who seeds love inside the hearts of mortal enemies.
Now Simon is in the kitchen, and there is a meaty humidity to the room and that Slavic cabbage stench. It’s possible that Simon is not in his body. That he is not physically there in the kitchen, for when he looks down he has no limbs, no body. He comes close enough to see the hairs on the back of the woman’s neck rise. Close enough to see what’s in the pot.
It’s hands. Human hands. Dozens of them, stewing in a febrile broth.
They are small hands, one could even say child-size.
The woman turns. Her eyes are filled with teeth.
Simon wakes in the van to find the Prophet sitting over him. Behind him is the glow of the setting sun.
“He’s talking to you,” says the boy formerly known as Paul.
“Who?”
“God.”
Simon shakes his head. His mouth tastes woolly.
“Who is Uriel?” he asks, unclear of where the name has come from, just that it is in his mouth.
“Some say he is a cherub or a seraph, but most believe he is an archangel. When the ten plagues descended on Egypt he was known as the Angel of Death. It was he who wrestled Jacob, he who told Noah of the coming flood. Did you see him?”
Simon thinks of the woman stirring her pot of hands, shakes his head. “No. It’s just the—withdrawal. Must be. All the pills.”
“You still miss them,” says the Prophet. “Klonopin, Zoloft, Adderall.”
Simon rubs his eyes. “I never took Adderall. That’s for kids with ADHD.”
The Prophet takes a Twizzler from his shirt pocket, takes a bite. “The feeling though,” he says. “That medicated distance. The artificial quiet.”