Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series)

Exit Unicorns

By

Cindy Brandner

Also by Cindy Brandner

Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

Flights of Angels

For my Auntie Marlene

It’s the smell of burning that I remember most clearly from that autumn. And the burning, the burning smelled like revolution.

I look back in age, in a stillness that grips and stultifies and think I saw even then shape of things to come. The design in the web that Fate in all her knowing wove.

I forget, in those months, at the end of a decade that became an emblem for change, that in the air about us there swirled a thousand possibilities attached to a million more.

Faith can move mountains they say, but they never tell you what price such faith can exact.

I believe, as perhaps I must, that there was only ever the one road to bring me to where I am today. I believe it and think that makes it true. But does it?

Part One
The Door Unlatched

A moon, milk-white as a dove’s tail, newly round as fresh churned butter, rose skimmingly on a furred black bed. This Jamie Kirkpatrick observed through eyes attached too dearly to a brain soaked and swollen from three days worth of scotch.

He was dead. Of this much he was certain. He was dead and someone was singing
‘Ave Maria’
in a tender voice that understood the childlike yearning of the music. Very nice, Jamie thought, so there was to be angels singing in heaven. A relief that, trite perhaps, but a relief nonetheless. He wasn’t in hell and he supposed that was a good thing. He reconsidered his geography a moment later as the first orchestral wave of pain made its way through the layers of unconsciousness. Perhaps, he thought wincing, perhaps hell
was
singing angels.

An angel spoke. “The boy is drunk,” it said.

An English angel? This
must
be Irish hell.

“If we don’t bring him around soon he’ll miss the funeral,” said a rather more peevish tone.

Funeral? So he hadn’t even been buried yet and that made this purgatory. He mentally demoted the speakers from cherubim and seraphim to outcast rebel angels. Neither heaven nor hell,
not
such a relief that.

There was a sound like a thousand nails on a chalkboard and then sunlight, turbo-charged, landed on his eyelids with a thump. Long filaments of pain plucked at blind nerves, the string section beginning its warm-up.

Powers of speech in abeyance, James Stuart Kirkpatrick the Third and it would seem, Final, settled for a weak wiggle of the fingers. No one noticed.

“Christ,” said the first voice, “it smells like a three day old corpse in here, didn’t anyone notice he was drinking?”

There was a short silence, embarrassed in its depth that spoke eloquently of how inappropriate the remark had been.

“Damned Irish,” continued the first angel imperiously (definitely British origin that one) unimpeded by its faux-pas, “can’t hold their liquor worth a fig.”

“Let he,” intoned a sepulchral voice that sounded, to Jamie, remarkably like his own, “who is lily-white gild the first stone, the corpse,” there was a vinegary laugh that seemed to swoop about his face, “is not deaf.”

God spoke then, voice of dry authority, words falling with spherical precision, like one ice cube upon the next, “Cast, dear boy is, I believe, the word you are looking for.”

A sound of scythes, sparkling with sun, cutting through future words and thought, sliced through the room.

“You two may leave. I will get his Lordship up.” The scurrying feet of dismissed angels and then a sigh, cleaving inebriation neatly down the middle and dropping it to either side of the bed.

“Can you open your eyes, Jamie?”

Jamie, in some instinctual wisdom, attempted one eye at a time. The left eye upon opening found the belt of Orion glittering above it,
Al Nilam, Al Nitak
and the small, tipping from the sky
Mintaka
—champagne gold, palest blue and delicate lichen green. He closed the eye and tried the right, above it hovered some fuzzy, wee being that was lit like milk over opals. His soul perhaps? He closed his eye again.

“I think not,” he said through a vocal box that felt as though it were culturing penicillin.

“Damned barbaric Saxon custom, being sober at one’s father’s funeral. Nevertheless it is customary to be able to walk upright into the service, so up we go dear boy.”

A whoosh of nausea, so vast and varied in its array that Jamie thought he might pass out from it (were he not already dead) swept over him.

“There you’re sitting up and though you don’t look very pretty, it is progress. Now tell me your name.”

“James Stuart Kirkpatrick,” Jamie croaked.

“Good and now mine,” the voice coaxed.

“God,” Jamie replied with certitude.

“My
name
, I said,” the tone was quickly becoming exasperated, so much, Jamie thought, for eternal patience.

“Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim,” Jamie ventured meekly, hearing in the distance the firm click of pearly gates shutting.

“Well I suppose I’ve been called worse,” the voice muttered, “alright, different tactic then, recite the Arabic alphabet to me.”

God was Muslim. There were going to be an awful lot of irate Catholics in purgatory, he wouldn’t be lonely at any rate.

He dutifully recited the alphabet; air swirling in bruising eddies about his fractured nerves. Rote memory failed and nausea prevailed just as he reached
eliph
and he halted abruptly to throw up in a champagne bucket that had been placed handily beneath his chin.

“Men,” said a voice like honey melting through dark rum, “never know how to handle these things properly.” Lutes of memory piped, drums of pain began their first thumping chorus in his head and Jamie began to consider that he might be really rather undead. There was death— yes—but not his own.

“I’ll put him in the shower,” the honeyed voice continued, “and you go down to the kitchen and see if you can’t get hot coffee, a pint of scotch and some aspirin.” Muslim or not, God was being bossed rather badly.

In no condition to protest, Jamie found himself submitting to hands whose ministrations were, if not tender, at least appealing. A shower of freezing cold water followed by hot then cold again. This pattern, repeated until he howled in protest, had its desired effect and he could, when opening his eyes, see the owner of the honey rum voice. There was a rather limited amount of sympathy in her face so he closed his eyes again.

Swirling champagne golds, palest fainting blues, mossy lichen greens settled and became the colors of his father’s suite, the moon, no longer milk white, a gilded mirror. Moon, stars, God and angels fled in the wake of memory.

Like silk, like wine, like taffy or molten lead, depending on your perspective, Jamie was alternately poured, pushed and molded into an oyster gray suit. Washed, pomaded, buffed, gilded and spit forth from the half-shell like an errant pearl.

Coffee, blisteringly fragrant, was shoved under his nose, three white aspirin staring up at him like mutely blind mice.

“Velvet for the hammer blows,” said Miss Honey Rum, her voice softened by several shades of grief.

“What’s the scotch for?” he asked, nodding toward the bottle of amber-bitten poison she’d requested.

“Courage,” she grimly uncapped the scotch, poured a generous three fingers into a glass and swallowed it smoothly down, “my own that is.”

“Thanks Jessica,” he said quietly, smiling at the one female of his own age he’d managed to keep as friend and nothing more nor less, since childhood. The enormity of the day began to press down rather heavily on his newly found sobriety. “How late am I?”

“No so very late,” she said kindly, “but I thought you might like to know that President de Valera is waiting downstairs to make his condolences to you.”

“What?” Jamie nearly choked on the mouthful of boiling coffee he’d been gingerly nudging towards his throat. Definitely undead.

“What indeed,” God, in the form of his old Oxford literature professor and dearest friend, Jonathan Wexler, re-entered the room, a pearly gray overcoat draped over his arm. “His granddaughter Sile is with him and they’d like a minute of your time as he’s not really well enough to attend the service.”

Jamie rose carefully, giving his equilibrium time to sort out the dimensions of floor and ceiling.

“How long has he been waiting?” he asked, wanting to plug his ears and avoid the answer.

Jessica, fair and restrained in a black dress, consulted her watch. “About twenty minutes, which is—”

“About nineteen and a half minutes longer than he’s used to waiting,” John interjected, “so I propose we get downstairs.”

Jamie nodded, numb and wordless. On the way down the stairs, he contemplated several methods of apology for his inebriated tardiness and rejected them all as inferior to merely falling facedown on the carpet and groveling at the man’s feet. Which, when faced, in his father’s study, with the man in the flesh, seemed quite inadequate as well.

Eamon de Valera, the stuff of Irish political legend, ‘The Long Fellow’, the man who had achieved mythic proportions akin to those of Old Testament prophets, sat, frail and sightless, in the study’s harmonies of garnet and mahogany, a cup of tea balanced severely on his knee. The man who was Irish history for nearly all of the twentieth century, looked directly with blind eyes into Jamie’s own and said, “Son, I am very sorry for your loss, your father was a fine man. He will be missed by many.”

Sile de Valera composed and graceful in brown tweed, rose and shook Jamie’s hand, “Forgive us for intruding here today but Grandfather was,” she smiled ruefully, “adamant about making his condolences in person.”

Jamie smiled, “Please don’t apologize. I’m honored to have both of you in my home. It’s I who should apologize for making you wait; I was only just informed—”

One long-fingered hand, the hand that had been fitted to the glove of its country, rose and put a halt to his words.

“No matter young man, no matter. Sit down will you? It makes me nervous when someone hovers above my head.”

Jamie sat.

What followed was, in the light of Jamie’s rather dazed and bemused recollection, a spot of warmth in a very black day. There were recollections of his father, a tangential discussion on the state of Irish literature in this year of 1968 and a dissection of the finer points of Anglo-Irish affairs. The entire episode, he would see in retrospect, had been designed to lift him up and away from his grief for a small space.

It was likely the only thing that got him through the rest of the day with any modicum of dignity. A funeral at best is a dismal affair, an Irish Catholic funeral, replete with incense, Latin intonations and the flutter and flurry of purple robes, was in terms of misery, at the apex of that particular quality.

At the graveside, things began to slide from bad to worse however. The omnipresent Irish rain had begun to fall and it seemed God was either spectacularly absent or possessed of a maudlin sense of humor.

Jamie knelt, kissed the polished mahogany of his father’s coffin, felt the white-waxen scent of roses fill his senses and knew himself suddenly to be alone, without a guard between himself and his own mortality. He felt the fine mist of rain on his cheek and heard as though through a muffling veil one of the plump purple-robed pigeons of Christ mutter that a man who’d broken so openly with the church and whose death was at best questionable, ought not, perhaps, to have had such a sendoff.

Jamie, still kneeling, asked, quite politely all things considered, how many years one got in purgatory for the murder of a prince of the church?

It all looked likely to erupt into a less than reverent scene when a sudden silence descended and the empurpled pigeons scuttled to the far end of the grave. Turning his head, Jamie saw the long, tall figure that had so recently graced his father’s study, stop just short of the grave, cane hitting the ground with a thump that reverberated under the feet of all assembled. Proud and rare as a blue heron, Eamon de Valera smiled at him quite mildly and said gently, “I believe your daddy was an admirer of John Donne, was he not?”

“He was at that,” Jamie replied, suppressing an unseemly grin.

“Well then,” said the backbone of the nation and began, without preamble, to recite:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee,
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

Moments later when he reached:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more: Death, thou wilt die!

There was not a dry eye to be found. He stood beside Jamie like a stalwart relation as the mourners filed past, nodding and murmuring a word or two to their stunned and awed babble. When the representatives of God, faces plummier than their attire, made their way past, these men to whom all knees bent and all voices lowered, to whom reverence was mere sugar in the tea, to them he inclined his head slightly and said ‘Gentlemen,’ in a freezingly quiet voice.

“Thank you again,” Jamie said to him later as the old man, leaning wearily on his cane, prepared to leave.  “I can’t tell you how much it would have meant to my father that you came here today.”