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Sometimes he still sees the angel.
Venus does not admit this to anyone. He has learned, over the years, that there are absolute limits to the capacity of others to help. He is stable, now; sane or sane enough. He takes his pills. He repeats his mantras. He breathes with clockwork precision, and heads off the attacks before they can tear him apart. Easy to simply be cured, when to be sick is to endure years more of secondhand shame and stifling pity. More than anything he does not want to be alone.
The last time it was a cold fall, sliding towards winter. His breath fogged in the night air. How strange it always was, to be reminded of the material of his body. If Venus had a choice, he’d be a word: depthless, substanceless, the way the world was when God spoke it into being. His parents took his early interest in the Bible as a sign he shared their zeal. They dreamed of his future in the priesthood. Their pride seems so distant now, lost in the fog that encompasses his entire childhood.
It wasn’t the book. It was the words. They were pure, the way he wanted to be.
On that night, the stop was empty. The line was on an elevated platform a story above the street below: he could see, if he stepped to the edge and looked down, people moving in the benthic wash of orange streetlights. The sounds of the city came to him as if transmitted from an extremely far distance. Somewhere a plaintive siren receded into the night.
He was returning from a party: some friends of his had found a new place, one ideally more permanent than their last apartment. The room was small and intensely warm; he felt his cheeks and nose were grotesquely flushed the entire time, as if he was some cut-rate version of Santa Claus. His friends, ever the magnanimous hosts, had served canapés and made small talk and leaned against one another in that way that makes Venus ever so slightly sick when he thinks about it, that casual, guileless support of one body by another. He desperately wishes he could be that… what? Trusting, perhaps. Faithful. And he, the preacher’s son among them.
Half of the attendants there had been strangers, delegates from some region of their lives of which Venus had no awareness. They were, all of them, vital, exciting people. They seemed as if they were on the verge of some new summit of achievement and self-actualization, that life for them would be nothing but a series of doors opening on larger and larger rooms, until finally one revealed behind it a boundless space, an infinite stretch of possibility into which they could impress themselves. Venus drifted from conversation to conversation, saying little, holding his body in a manner he hoped would convey interest and agreeability. In his retreat from his nerves he had drunk too much. Now the world was paved over with a leaden fog, and he felt a dull awareness of tomorrow’s regrets creeping towards him like a stalking animal.
He cannot, it seems, spend any length of time amongst other human beings without subjecting himself to a merciless internal debriefing: an index of each and every conversational faux pas and embarrassing failure of etiquette for which he is responsible. The joke he had attempted two hours ago now struck him as so astonishingly malformed he struggled to believe his vocal cords hadn’t developed a spontaneous paralysis in protest. Every moment in which he succumbs to the urge to speak is a moment in which he reveals his weakness. It is only the world’s sheer indifference to his existence that has prevented someone from prying him open and exposing, beneath the skin, the half-formed manque of a human being he truly is.
He wanted very badly to be in bed: to read, to sleep, to dream. Once, he had been praised for his imagination. Such a quality was appealing in a child, when you still had no idea of the man he would become. Dreaming, to him, is less an indulgence and more the desperate flight of a mind capable of inhabiting no other region. He does not belong in the world. If he fills himself with fairy castles and primeval woods and brave women in mail and plate, it is to heighten the walls of the bunker inside himself, where nothing and no one can hurt him. In sleep he is most untethered from the violent materiality of the world of the senses. His body and history fall from him, and he drifts, content. He cannot escape the slender knife of grief which always pierces him when, upon waking, he discovers he is still himself.
He stood, that night, on the southbound side of the tracks, in a small covered area lit by a meager fluorescent lamp. On the opposite side of the tracks a similar shelter stood, solely illuminated by the ruddy ambience of the city around it. Inside the shelter was a framed poster, a PSA for something or other; between his own gradually declining eyesight and the cracks in the glass he couldn’t quite make out the words.
An electronic sign a dozen or so feet further down the walkway listed the various routes and their arrival times. Apparently an incident on the tracks had caused his own to be delayed by three minutes. He waited another minute, crossing his arms and sticking his opened palms under his armpits to warm them. The sign had updated: his train had now been delayed by five minutes. An empty bag of chips, caught on a desultory breeze, scraped lightly over the concrete. Venus groaned, for the benefit of no one. There was—
He walked to the edge. There was a glint reflected in the glass of the shattered poster frame. It was as if someone was standing where he stood, and shining a flashlight into the glass; the light was sourceless, a reflection of nothing.
He felt, at that moment, something undefinable moving inside his body. It was an emotion for which no adequate word existed, terrible and beautiful at once. Joy and want and hideous grief were within it, all conjoined, so that there was no way to distinguish one from the other. If he had a rock, he would have flung it at the glass, shattered the light, abolished it; he can’t endure what it brings. To be standing in a crowd, to be sinking into sleep, to be losing oneself in work, to be in bed with a woman, and suddenly feel the most absolute despair, that the distance between you and every living human being was a universal principle, that you were beyond love, beyond care, beyond want, that you were being eaten from the inside, that you were damaged beyond even an understanding of your own wounds, that the cold and dark would take you and you would be theirs forever— that is what the angel brings with it. And beauty: terrible and inaccessible and absolute.
He saw it. The darkness of the glass seemed to ripple, and all at once plunged back, as if the glass was the surface of a pool of such tremendous depth that light could not reach the bottom. The angel floated in it. It was a cataract of light, every inch of its body covered with eyes of the most startling blue. Its wings curled around itself, clothing it. The lines of its body were vaguely feminine. All pretense of control had been abandoned. Venus stared, terrified, desperate.
“Please,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
With imperial slowness, the angel lifted its gaze to meet his own. Its long white hair stirred in the dark like clouds of drifting smoke. Its expression was unbearably sad. Venus folded himself into a ball under the bus shelter, shuddering, trying to keep himself from weeping.
“Please,” he said, although if the direction of his pleas was towards the angel or himself he could not tell.
Gradually the angel drew back, drawing itself into the endless distance. By degrees it became a circle of pure light, then a blinding mote, which twinkled for a moment and then vanished. Venus gasped, as if some tether which bound him to that other creature had been severed.
He stood up, swaying gently on his feet. Before him, behind a yellow hazard line, stood the shallow, rail-lined trench of the train tracks. Not for the first time he considered how it might feel to climb down inside. To lie down and rest his head against the metal, to feel the cold of it against his cheeks. To listen for the approach of the train, like distant thunder. To close his eyes, and, for a while, dream.
He stood at the edge and thought.