If Angels Fight (12 page)

Yet on the edge of triumph it felt stabs of intense longing for those lone, lost crusades.

Now the city shimmered in the presence of the one who had reimagined it. The liquid in the capsule burned Christopher’s smiling mouth. Where Christopher turned his gaze, glowing esplanades rippled along the river banks.

A figure rose above the buildings. On the front of the Clockmaster’s slouch hat appeared the face of Big Ben. Out of his ears and along his shoulders moved the same mechanical procession of princes, priests, and populace that emerges twice a day from the great, high clock of the Cathedral of Ghent. Seconds sprayed from the Clockmaster’s long right arm. Hours pumped from the short left one.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the jacket said sharply. “It’s an illusion. He’s not as big as a whale. Nor as tall as many castles.”

The Clockmaster raised both hands. Seconds and minutes rattled off the hood of the car. Hours and days smashed the trunk. The blue Dodge hung a sharp right and passed through the Arctic Portals that sprang into being to greet its rusting grille. The shrapnel of hours and the scattered buckshot of seconds embedded themselves in the diamond surface of ice, where they would become the Memorials to Time Once Frozen, in Maxee, City of Stillness, when it was no longer still and dead.

The Clockmaster seen in the rearview mirror, reminded Chris of an amusement park ride.

The Dodge thundered down a winding marble slope. On a terrace just over the edge of the ramp, Christopher saw a flash of red hair. The jacket quivered on his back. A name appeared in Christopher’s mind as he felt the heat the passion course quickly through him: Red Pauline.

A figure in an amber robe and feathered helmet appeared beside her.

He raised his Flux staff and called out. He wished to talk.

“I’m glad someone the hell wants to talk,” said Christopher, hitting the brakes.

Then he yelled. The jacket forced his hands off the steering wheel. The Dodge left the marble road and spun in the air. Maxee spiraled.

Christopher yelled again and bit viciously on what remained of the Blue Maria, trying to get his hands back on the wheel.

Then it was night. Headlights blazed and horns blared. Under a quarter moon, the Dodge touched down on asphalt, drove diagonally across a highway and jumped an embankment as Chris and the jacket struggled for control.

12.

Iron doors clanged in the distance. A static-filled radio echoed down a hall.

Christopher rolled his head back. His eyes opened a slit to a smear of fluorescent lights.

“Watch him.” Hands held him up, went through his pockets. “Kleenex. Stick of gum. Sixty-five, no, sixty-seven cents. Keys for the Dodge. House keys. Wallet. Two dollars. State College I.D. for Christopher J. Deware. Driver’s license for same. Birthdates June 3, 1945. Draft card, 2S, says he’s exactly two years older. Wrist watch looks like it got smashed just now. High school ring.”

“Christopher Deware? Chris? CHRISTOPHER! You hear me?”

“Look at his eyes. Nobody home in there. He spends the night.” Hands unbuckled his belt, whipped it through the loops and off him. “One brown leather belt. Hold your pants up, stupid bastard. Shoes off. Pair of black loafers.”

“Hold him. Going to fall.”

“Lock him down.”

Christopher found himself moving barefoot. His head lolled. Through silted eyes, he saw a metal door open. Someone whistled and said, “Ohhh, my,” when they saw him.

“Lou, this one’s too fucked up to take care of himself. Mr. and Mrs. Deware won’t like finding out their baby choked to death on his own vomit while getting gang raped.”

“Cuff him outside the cage, then. Get that jacket off him.”

“Fancy leather. Never felt anything like it. Like butter.”

Christopher felt it slipping away. His eyes opened all the way. He twisted. “Down boy.” Slammed against the bars. The pain was like an echo. He fell. The jacket came off. The light went out of his eyes. His tongue lolled out of mouth. Blue liquid dribbled on his chin. “What’s that stuff?”

Chris saw the jacket fall, end over end, past steel walkways, past halls of glass and stone, blown like a leaf out of Maxee, the Spiral City.

Beyond the jacket, he saw the one who had thrown the jacket free. The figure bent over the Bridge of Unspoken Remorse. Chris knew the figure’s name. Seth Jackson.

Then he saw the Clockmaster rise behind the creator of the jacket.

And everyone, the bailiffs, the prisoners, paused and listened to the sound of bells that tinkled like ice in a thousand big, big, highball glasses.

13.

Bright metal fish gathered in the air, their shadows blocking the light from the double suns high in the noonday sky.

In that twilight, a red-haired figure stood on a walkway overlooking the Charm Chasm. She stared down at the spinning turbines that powered Maxee, the Artificial City, and at the long lines of husklike dead souls, who provided the fuel to power the turbines.

Chimes tinkled. A glass swan floated up. Its side opened, to release Tomkin of the Tomkins.

“You have heard,” he said.

“About the Clockmaster,” said Red Pauline. “Rooted to the spot where that young man last saw him.”

Her voice had a rare warmth.

“And all is changed. On my way here, I was stopped by a crowd—what they call a family. Of people! They asked me where all the tourists were. I told them there were none. None at all. Never can be. Maxee grows out of the stillness of all Time.”

He paused. A tinkling filled the air.

“At least that was my understanding,” he said.

“He will return, you know,” said Red Pauline.

“We must be ready, then.”

“I already am.” Her distant smile was like the faint swell of a wave.

14.

Chris awoke to the smell of ammonia and a bailiff poking his shoulder.

“Rise and shine, son. Parents here.”

A radio blared early morning news. “Campaigning in Wichita yesterday, President Johnson promised a new small farmer initiative. His opponent, Senator Goldwater, decried what he described as Big Government. In local news, several people reported a bright object the size of a car in the sky last night. The Air Force National Guard reports no unusual incidents.”

An old black man washed the floor. Chris tried to move an arm. The bailiff unlocked the cuff from the bar.

Chris’s eyes focused for a moment. “That jacket . . .”

He stopped trying to speak. His voice was slurred and hoarse.

The bailiff nodded and said, “Don’t worry. On your feet.” He held the open cuff and pulled the kid along to the restroom. Chris held up his pants with his free hand.

Ordinary-enough looking, Chris sensed the bailiff thinking, but headed down a very wrong road.

Down a very wrong glass bridge, Chris added.

The Dewares, Bill and Alice, both wore car coats and expressions of anxious concern. Bill was writing a check at the front desk.

When the room steadied again, Chris found the cuffs off. He had his shoes and belt in one hand, and his valuables in a manila envelope in the other.

Alice turned. “Honey! You OK? We were so worried.” She embraced him. “Oh, you’re cold! Where’s your jacket?”

“Right here.” The bailiff came out of the office, reading the label. “’Made in Maxee, the Well Upholstered City.’ Never seen anything like this.”

“Peru,” Bill said. “Picked it up on a business trip.”

He tried to get Chris to put the jacket on. Chris shrugged him off. He was seeing clearly, all of the sudden.

“We need to have a talk, son,” said Bill.

The bailiff, with a chuckle born of having heard many such talks, saw them out the door.

The Deware’s Country Squire station wagon sat parked beside the ragtop.

Chris, the jacket held in one hand, put his face back to absorb the warm sun, then looked around. No one else stood in the lot.

“I saw it,” he said, his voice still unsteady and hoarse. “I saw Maxee, City of Steel Lace. Saw it. And then,” he said, almost laughing, “I played it like a piano.”

“Oh, shit, Bill,” said Alice. “His eyes.”

“What the hell happened, sir?” Bill asked the jacket.

The reply was no more than a distant tinkling.

“Honey, what’s happened to the jacket?” said Alice.

“Thing tried to kill me,” said Chris. “It wants to control me, but I don’t trust it. Especially now.”

“It must have had reasons for whatever it did,” said Alice. “It’s saving the City. So are you. The jacket said so. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

Chris carried the jacket by the collar, and tugged the car door open. “I need to shave and shower, and get my stuff.”

“What do you mean?” said Alice.

“I’m leaving. Taking the jacket back home. For good, this time,” Chris said. “Before it kills me or I rip it apart.”

“To Maxee!” She wailed. “But we’ve never even seen it!”

Chris reached into his jeans pocket, drew out three blue capsules, handed one to each of them and kept one. He finally smiled, seeing how the Dewares’ eyes glistened.

“One bite and you’re on the road to Maxee, City of a Million Busted Metaphors.” He said, “Just ignore the part where the inside of your mouth tries to climb onto the top of your head.”

15.

On the approach to Maxee, City of Cosmic Brain Waves, Chris drove slowly, keeping his mind blank.

Nothing around the car changed. He wanted it that way, this time.

“You did what Seth Jackson wanted,” he said to the jacket. “Your job’s over. This way’s best.”

The only sound then from the jacket was the faint humming of an ancient skip-rope song.

Chris stood by the blue ragtop, at the outskirts of the City Without End and waited.

They came as metal fish, swimming slowly above the pavement. One was huge and green. The second, red. The third, tiny and silver, hovering behind the other two. The three floated where the Crystal Road met the Boulevard of Ancient Dances, an intersection Chris had created on his last visit.

In the distance, looming above a Day-Glo minaret, the Clockmaster stood faced in another direction, motionless save for the ant-like priests and soldiers marching up and down his shoulders.

“I am Tomkin of the Tomkins, former Flux-Agent of Maxee,” said the green fish. “And this is Red Pauline, a local agitator. And now I see,” the fish said, turning so one bulbous eye could gaze backwards, “We also have Simmoo, the Last Teacher. He would insist on coming. ‘An eye on the present is an eye on the future,’ he is always saying. Hello, Simmoo.”

The fish to the rear folded inwards, and became a slender man with hair white to one side, golden to the other.

At the transformation, a sigh escaped the green fish. The scales of its sides trembled and then became panes of glass, and then air, leaving Tomkin of the Tomkins standing in the street.

Laughter escaped the fish that shrank into the bright splash of hair atop the head of Red Pauline.

“Chris Brown,” said Chris.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Simmoo, staring intently.

“Chris,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins. “I have much for which to thank you. Having the jacket will complete me. It embodies what Jackson knew, and what he denied the Clockmaster.” Tomkin of the Tomkins smiled and held out his hand. “Please. I do appreciate it. You are so kind in coming.”

“It is for her,” Chris said. “Not you.”

“Alas, she can do nothing with that jacket. She is a creature merely of the city, thus of mine, as new Clockmaster.”

“This intersection needs a traffic signal,” Chris said. Tomkin of the Tompkins stood rooted in place and began to flash green then yellow, then red then yellow.

Beside the door of the ’54 Dodge, Pauline kissed Chris: fire on ice.

“Hello,” she said then to the jacket. “I think we need to take up your sleeves a little.”

The skip-rope song changed to a single oboe note of quiet despair.

Simmoo laughed and followed them back into Maxee.

Then Chris stood alone beside his ragtop, blinded by the vision of beauty wrapped in flame from the edges of the sky. One sun rose while another set. Blue Maria bitterness was in his mouth.

A fast U-turn, and away.

In moments, the Dodge rolled down an early-morning street full of mid-Twentieth Century ranch houses. Its driver was a young man in a really beat up car with no home to go to.

He was happy.

And chilled. Reaching into the duffel bag stuffed with notebooks and clothes, he drew out an old denim jacket.

Before he reached the highway, he remembered the sight of the Clockmaster rising above the buildings of Maxee, the Terminal City.

Before that could fade like a dream, Chris stopped and wrote a few lines.

16.

In a Western city, some years later, a young editor named Will Clark listened to the clang and honking of metal works and traffic coming in a window. Stupid-ass place for a bookshop and publishing house, Will had thought a hundred times. He planned to think it a hundred times more.

Will liked it here.

“That crazy kid publishing those City Bright things out East, you know him? Real name’s Chris something. But calls himself Jacket Jackson, right?” said Will, settling in the chair in front of Marty Stein’s desk.

“Sure,” said the publisher.

“Look at this.”

Stein looked at what seemed to be and then did not seem to be a hand-written manuscript.

“What the hell is this, and where the hell from?”

“Supposed to be like a tourist guide to that city, Maxee, the kid writes about. Someone I know introduced me to this couple, the Dewares. Seemed nice and straight, at first.

“Then they started talking about a leather jacket that was like a god and that now some lady in Maxee has dyed it red to match her hair. Said they were Jacket Jackson’s adoptive parents, which is crazy. But they had this picture, mug shot actually, from some DWI bust. Could be of him when he was real young. The I.D. says ‘Christopher Deware.’

“Anyway, they’d been grooving to Maxee for years. Before the kid began publishing or anything. Finally got up courage to go there themselves.”

“To a make-believe city?”

“Right. That’s what they said. And then they said this is the tourist guide everybody carries there. I just laughed, then I read it. Wingy as all hell, but really well done. Holds your attention, too.”