Futile Efforts (28 page)

"Who are those like me?"

"The insane."

"What have you got against us?"

"On a personal level, nothing," the Archangel admitted.
  
"But you must prove yourself worthy of salvation."

Wynne thought he understood.
 
A madman wasn't accountable for his evil actions.
 
But neither was he responsible for the good that he did, the joy and love he felt in his heart.
 
God couldn't condemn him, but neither was he considered saved.

"So what now?
 
Purgatory?"
 
That could be worse than hell as the years stacked up over all eternity.
 
A place without substance, feeling, or meaning.
 
"Oblivion?"

"That's up to you," Gomez said.
 
"From this point on, you make choices in your right mind."

That stopped him.
 
"I'm not crazy anymore?"

"No, I healed you.
 
A moment ago."

Wynne didn't feel any different.
 
The same delirium and regrets and
guilts
threatened to overtake him.
 
His mind seemed just as volatile and blaring and crammed full of nonsense as ever.

"Now," Archangel Rafael, one of the seven who stand before the throne of God, patron saint of warriors and assassins, the dying and the damned, within the body of Gomez the dead Chihuahua, said.
 
"Go out there and battle some
hellspawn
."

It almost got Wynne laughing.
 
You're put into the most deranged situation you've ever been in and told that you're no longer nuts.
 
Just when you needed it they yanked it away.

"How?" he asked.

Faces went by in the window, some of them scared as they were reeled to heaven.
 
The dog hopped up onto the kitchen chair and from there jumped to the sink.
 
With his teeth, he picked up a dirty plastic knife and fork set that Wynne had used to eat Chinese takeout with three or four nights ago.
 
Gomez made a face and pointed his snout.

Scowling, Wynne stepped over and took the plastic cutlery from the dog's mouth. He looked around the kitchen counter but couldn't even find a steak knife.
 
He wasn't sure if he owned a real piece of silverware anymore, and the thought suddenly made him sad.
 
Was that clarity or merely self-pity?

Gomez said, "Here are your weapons.
 
When you need them, they shall transform into burning swords."

"You certain I'm not nuts anymore?"
 
The fork was cracked and missing a tine.
 
He thought the Lord could've started him off with a touch more oomph than this.
 
"All things being equal, I still feel a little unhinged."

"It's like that when you serve the path of righteousness.
 
Satan's minions are everywhere and your duty as a soldier of light is to slay them where you find them.
 
Go with God and do virtuous deeds in His name."

I
t sounded easy enough.
 
He'd done some fairly ridiculous shit in his life up to this point, and he figured this wasn't going to be much different, considering.

One bad time, he'd seen the face of his father pressing forward from the spines of all the books on a street vendor's table down on 59
^th
and Fifth.
 
There he was, hugging books, crying for daddy, while the tourists took photos of him and the cops dragged him down to lock-up.
 
Eventually, he was put on a new medication that made him think he was talking to time-traveling puppets in the shower, and it turned his piss blue.

All in all, he was looking forward to discovering if he had what it took to fight on the side of angels.

Wynne had to step into blood to get out his door.
 
The hallway was littered with the dying and the dead, most of them pressed to the edges of the hall as if someone had cleaned up the bodies, stacking them beside one another.
 
He counted seven people, but couldn't be sure who it was he heard groaning.

He knelt near Mrs.
Rhyerson
.
 
Her dress was torn, eyes still wide and full of dread.
 
He whispered her name and touched her cold face.
 
Wynne's stomach churned with doubt.
 
The wounds in her chest looked like they could've been made with kitchen utensils.

Had he finally gone off the big edge and run rampant through the building?
 
Was he already in a padded cell, or heading for one in the back of a police van?
   
Five years ago he'd been given shock therapy.
 
It was much more civilized than you see in movies, the rubber wedge jammed in your mouth, the giant electrodes burning the flesh at your temples, your body flopping and snapping wildly on the steel bed.
 
It was sophisticated and the juice sort of relaxed him, but instead of helping him back into his head, Wynne had hallucinated like a son of a bitch for three days.

Now, the bodies–the mewling moans quickly ebbing and falling silent in the corridor, you had to wonder.
 
This had the same structure of a drug-induced, electrified dream.

He started down the stairs and turned up to look towards his apartment door one last time, hoping Gomez might be there, lending him courage, urging him on.
 
But the doorway was empty except for the blood.
 
Even the bodies were gone now.

The silence surprised him.
 
He walked down Columbus Avenue, sort of strutting, seeing how the city had emptied.
 
There were still some floaters up there in the sky, but not so many anymore.
 
God did fast work.

Wynne hadn't even gone half a block before he saw half a dozen other ex-crazies slinking out onto the sidewalk.
 
In this city, there had to be thousands of schizoids, paranoids, catatonics, spiraling
obsessives
, extreme
bipolars
, and dissociative identity and dementia praecox cases left.
 
The homeless, the alcoholics, the
borderliners
who could function well and looked beautiful but behind closed doors acted out their lunatic drives.

He didn't know if they'd been cured too, but they all walked past one other smiling, giving little waves.
  
The others carried strange objects as well: tape dispensers, empty milk cartons, canisters of whip cream, model airplanes.

"We don't make for much of an army," Wynne said.

He'd seen demons earlier in the day, writhing in the subways, breaking loose.
 
Like the angels hovering overhead they appeared to be more creatures of energy and radiance, form without much substance.
 
No horns or cloven hooves, merely other beings that had a darkness and fury about them.
 
Wynne couldn't sense any evil, but that rage pulled at him, drawing him to the east side.

Wynne wandered downtown looking for some demons to slay.
 
The streets were deserted but the stink of blood and bile kept growing worse.
 
Heaven may have swept up the corpses, but it had left behind the fetid smell of fear, piss, and murder.

What he took to be his own hate and pain lured him down to Greenwich Village, step by step.

The only distinct difference he could feel now was one of intent.
 
Instead of trying to fill his hollow days with booze and bitter poetry, he'd been given a reason to move into the world.
 
A function to existence.

Had that always been the only disparity between he and sane men?
 
Could he have lived his life with a pittance of joy if only he'd found a goal early on when it would have mattered most?

Almost without realizing it, Wynne came to a stop before a small secondhand bookshop near St. Mark's Place.
 
He hadn't been here for some time, but years ago he'd spent most of his afternoons inside, perusing the tightly-packed shelves.
 
Finding books that somehow drained the fury by offering him other worlds.
 
Sometimes ones almost as nightmarish as his own, but not of his making.
 
It salved him, for a while there.

The old man, his name was
McQuill
.

He sat on a high rattan stool behind the counter, surrounded by towering stacks of hardback books.
 
Square-cut lenses in rimless glasses, eyes damp and black.
 
The bald egg-shaped head squeezing free from the buttoned collar, neck muscles and veins standing out harshly like after a great exertion.
  
McQuill
grinned as Wynne walked further into the store.

"Feels like stepping into your own anger, doesn't it?" the man asked.

"Yes," Wynne admitted.

"Like returning home?"

"To a home I despised."

"You're not so different now."

"I know," Wynne said.

Old man
McQuill
wasn't quite
McQuill
anymore.
 
There was an enormity to him now the same way as there had been in Gomez.
 
An eternal and immense nature seeping through such a small bogus frame.

All you could do was play it as cool as you possibly could.

Wynne tightened his grip on the plastic fork and knife and stepped to the counter.
 
The old man inspected him in an offhand way, constantly glancing about place as if seeing something Wynne could not.
 
It was oddly unsettling, and reminded him of the
schiz
cases on back on the ward who would look through you like they could see the atomic structure making up your molecular chains.

"Who are you?" Wynne asked.

McQuill
finally focused on Wynne, and showed his teeth.
 
They were yellow and square and set in a smile that displayed only malice.
  
Wynne found it comforting because the rancor was so understandable, so human in nature.
 
He'd seen that leer on bullies and know-it-alls his entire life.

"I'm Belial," the old man said.

"Why are you in Mr.
McQuill's
body?"

"It is the will of the Lord, and I do not challenge it."

Wynne drew his chin back and frowned.
 
"I thought that was the whole point of being a fallen angel."

"You know nothing of truth."

That gave him some pause.
 
If truth was beauty, and he'd been blinded to beauty by the depths of his anguish, had he also been blinded to truth?

The world around him, despite the death and angels and demons, still seemed very much the same.

He started to ask another question when Belial cut him off.
 
"I'm a Grand Duke of the Infernal Order, second Seraphim following Lucifer, soft in voice but full of treachery and lies."
 
He hesitated as if expecting awe.

Wynne said, "You guys and these self-serving names."

"Commander of eighty legions of hell.
 
Dedicated to wickedness, sexual perversions, fornication, and guilt."

"Well then, you're definitely the guy I've been looking for," Wynne said, thinking back on the reams of paperwork in his files explaining why he couldn't have a normal relationship with a woman.
 
"You prick."

"What is it you wish?"

"I'm supposed to slay you."
 
Wynne held up the plastic cutlery thinking…
Hey, this would be a pretty good time for these to turn into burning swords here.

"Why?"

"So I can get into heaven."

"Oh," Belial said.
 
"I should've realized.
 
You're one of the loonies left behind because you can't tell the difference between right and wrong."

"So they say.
 
Except I'm supposed to be cured now."

"Do you feel better?"

"Honestly, no."

"If you were sane would you really be holding a plastic knife and fork and looking to kill a bookstore owner inhabited by a Grand Duke of Hell?"