The Porcelein Angel Prologue: This is the story of an Angel, an Addict, and a Daemon - all of whom were redeemable and irredeemable in equal parts. Only G-d Himself knows the ending. ___________________________________________________________________________ Chapter One: The birth of an angel is no easy thing to witness. Besides the blood and the gashes, the angel may scream, but only soundlessly. Her hips will hurt too. A final insult, as if the slashes down the back, where the wings were placed against her knowing and her will, were insufficient to cause just enough pain. And, so, she screamed, silently, so that the wings would emerge whether she wanted them to or not. Please, please, some noise. She wanted the noise. Begged for it. But begging did her nothing. Pitiless, she cried without pitch or tone or volume or any other quality of sound. And all that she could think was that He was a sonofabitch. And that she was just sweet sixteen years old. And like any birth, the process was protracted, often unendurable, but there was no epidermal, no anaesthetic that would tamp down the ripping away of skin, the merging of bone to wing stem, the twisting of the pelvis. Gilly tried stretching along the cool of the bathroom floor, pressing the length of her skeleton and pushing down her soft belly, hoping that, maybe, ice white tile could give some relief or some tiny release. But colour does not mean comfort and even the whitest of white tile would do nothing to staunch the suffering, even if Gilly hoped. Instead, her arms circled the bottom of the porcelain toilet and, occasionally, when it all became too much, she heaved herself up as best she could to its lip and emptied the contents of her stomach. After a time, she could only eject water. Water and milk, which was all she drank during the day when she did not manage to get her hands on Rum. There was a single sound. Liquid churning violently against liquid. However, there were no moans, as if Gilly’s vocal chords had been cut, rendered paralytic and useless. Maybe this was the way that she was prevented from calling for an ambulance? But weren’t 911s equipped to hone in on an address whether or not a caller could speak? What could she say to the paramedics anyway? That this was a metamorphosis? I will be given wings and, every time I walk, my hips will ache with the pull of gravity. That I will never love again? Or, more accurately, that I will love every one equally and, so, no one in particular. That choice will be utterly removed. She vomited in the toilet bowl again. Over the last three years, from the onset of her first period, she’d become good friends with the Tidy Bowl man. She could hear him talking. “It’s ok.,” he would tell her, a teeny-tiny figure, so far as she could conjure him, bobbing along the toilet’s preternatural blue water. She figured he would look like Mr. Clean, all white and bald. But he’d have a boat, something with sails on it. Yes, that would be the Tidy Bowl man. The pirate of the pisser. He’d become her buddy. Even as she convulsed, she clung to him. It made the puking easier, even when she was no longer certain if she was barfing because of her anxiety, for which she had been given Paxil and Prozac before the doctors settled on Effexor, or because she’d sailed the high seas with Captain Morgan. It had all become a blur: She puked because she was anxious, and she drank to stop the anxious puking, so she puked from the calming drink which did not calm her at all; rather, it made her anxious because it occurred to Gilly that she was an alcoholic. And so it went, round and round. She liked sailing with Captain Morgan, liked him ever since she was required to clean up the glasses after her parents’ notoriously fabulous parties, and had poured all the liquor into a single cup and let the warmth slide down. She let go of that memory and twisted to her side, trying to remember the one time she had been “in love”, in love as humans would know it. Of all the booze that she drank in the ruins of the party, in a single concoction, how could she have settled on the Rum? Perhaps it was because the Captain took her where she could imagine Carribean Islands. Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica. Ocho Rios where she had first sensed love, a stirring towards a single boy whom she happenstanced on the beach where both she and he were doing nothing, really. His mother had been a Bond Girl. A real Ian Fleming original, so he said. A model of sexual... what? All Gilly knew was that she had met him on a beach and gave him an awful blow job (her first, so he shouldn’t have bitched about the teeth scrapes) and been kicked out that very night. Though he sought her out later. Later, maybe four days into her vacation, she straddled herself on his motorcycle, disgusted that she’d made herself so easy and ate Jerk Pork at his behest, even though pork was NOT okay. Pigs were intelligent and screamed when they finally figured out why they had come to the abattoir. But she had fallen in love. Even when he stank from the sweat that was pulled from his torso by a tropical sun. His name was Saul, and he would never find his way to Damascus, but Gilly didn’t care. He struck her as enigmatic. And she liked his curly hair, blue, reptilian eyes, always gazing beyond her, like he didn’t care one way or the other, and his swimmer’s build, though he barely swam. He spoke little, and Gilly confused that quiet with intelligence. Instead, he told her that he was a former drug addict. Since she was only fourteen and a half at the time and had never met a drug addict, especially one who was only sixteen years old, this fact didn’t entirely blow over her head. She heard it, registered it, but didn’t entirely care. He had begun using heroin in London. Everyone, so he said, was smoking smack back then. He simply did what everyone else did, very casual. He wanted to be hardcore, but he wasn’t, not really. Needles frightened him, and he could never get to the point where he would be comfortable injecting anything into his veins. His best friend, however, did a snowball and died as a result, on New Year’s Eve. This was enough to get Saul’s attention. He confessed his problem to his parents who immediately packed him up and sent him out to Ocho Rios where they family had “connections.” He was set up in a cousin’s hotel and cared for by a Jamaican matriarch who tolerated little foolishness, having five children, from two different men, to raise by herself. The matriarch's own family abused her for her promiscuity, though two men over a twenty-seven year history hardly seemed outrageous. Perhaps it would have been fairer if peoples' ire had been directed at the first man who had abandoned the matriarch after siring three children (one pregnancy resulting in twins) after two years and who disappeared into Kingston thereafter, bored of life on the beach and the demands of a nine-to-five job. The second man, a Rastafarian, had been shot after trying to rescue a tourist from a mugging. To compensate the matriarch, the threatened tourist offered one thousand dollars, figuring that was a greater sum than she would normally see by any insurance company, even if her husband had life insurance which, of course, he did not. The matriarch used the money to pay off some outstanding debts and to raise a suitable headstone to a hero. Gilly tried to conjure the rest of the time she spent with Saul during this family vacation, but his face slid away and she could not reconfigure his features. He came to her as a blur, a knot of feelings that also began to disentangle itself, so that she could not understand the madness that had come upon her when she was on that island. All her emotion spilled away as she mutely and convulsively spewed more liquid in the toilet bowl. She emptied herself and was being made empty. She did not know if this was a blessing. She did know that she would never have those feelings again. Ever. No matter how handsome the boy, no matter how romantic the circumstances, no matter how much Rum she drank. But she would always be able to recall the injustice to the matriarch. The fact that a wealthy North American would be so miserly in valuing his own life, solely because he could get away with it. Certainly, the North American would regard his precious presence on the planet as having a worth that was at least one million times greater than a measly $1,000.00. Still, a Jamaican mother with five children should relish the monies given, because that was an act of charity and didn`t have to be offered. Crumbs need never be offered, but, once they were, they should be respected as an act of generosity of sorts, and respected as such. The tourist didn`t have to give the money, so he was a fine man for so doing, and everyone back home slapped his back and told him so, as he beamed under the light of congratulation. Shaking, Gilly dropped her head over the toilet for one last time, vomited the final mass of liquid, rolled over, and prayed that her mother wouldn’t be too upset about the smell and the mess in the bathroom. She knew that she would have to use paper towels to mop up the blood. If she used a towel, she’d be killed. ___________________________________________________________________________ Chapter Two: Smug little buggers, those angels - incapable of seeing the greyness of things. Everything was black and white, for them; nothing in colour. To them, everything was arranged, put in place for their convenience, very pretty. And wrong, wrong, wrong. Because angels don’t really feel much. They merely know the Right from the Wrong, and there is no nuance in that position. They will always choose the Right. There’s nothing human in it. Denholm shoved his hands in his pea-jacket’s pockets while he mused this over. It was not so much that his hands were cold as that he liked to affect this pose. It made him look remote and dangerous which was a good thing. That way, he could slink in and out of anyone’s life. He was certainly desired - both boys and girls wanted him, though for different reasons - but closeness was an impossibility. It was sticky and, thus, difficult to navigate because humans had real problems letting go of that to which they had grown attached. Still, he needed to sidle up to people, to his peers, to gain their confidence. He needed to know the full rainbow of human feeling, even if he didn’t want to know them: Their lusts, their hopes, their fears, their jealousies, their petty squabbles, their pride, self-pity, their greed and gluttony. Every. Single. Human. Frailty. That was his business and his joy, even when he was absolutely disgusted by it. But Angels subscribed to something different: You Do this, and you Don’t do that. Because this or that was the right thing to do. A simpleton’s proposition. And simpletons had no right to interfere in human affairs. Yet, they did, anyway. Denholm wasn’t quite sure if this disgusted him more than the humans themselves. But He insisted that angels do these things, the Old Boy; that was their mandate. That was what had started The War and kept The War going. They were supposed to aid people, and, in return, people would look to the angels to keep them safe. The irony, of course, was that Daemons were also angels. But without the wings. Without any ability to ascend. Their wings had been cut off in the Great Letting. Denholm despised the angels, despised their right brain thinking. He stood aside, keen and aware. The Angels' justice was cruel, cold as the tomb; their judgement was the judgement of idiots who’d never read about the suffering contained in any great piece of Russian literature, but who were well versed in the arcana that was America’s Next Top Model, Big Brother, Dancing with the Stars. He swore to resist them - their juvenalia and irresponsibility. When they could see beyond their own hypocrisy, he might take them seriously. But not yet, not yet. It occurred to Denholm that the problem was that people did look to the angels, praised them. Sanctified them, even. And that was not okay. Humans were looking the wrong way. They bought their angel pins from novelty shops and proudly wore them on their lapels. Mostly women did this. Men did not generally do this. Men knew better. Or were stunningly insipid. Denholm wasn't exactly sure which. Women, on the other hand, should have known better. But who knew anything? Denholm seldom went to novelty stores or card shops. The sentimentality of those places just killed him. Hallmark killed him. So he hung outside the card shop while the babe du jour fingered the teddy bears and laboured over which Happy Sweet Sixteen birthday card she'd select for her bestest-bestest friend, like, ever. ______________________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 2008 Tracy Jean Amelia Tj Harrison |