“How do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death” ~ee cummings
He was dreaming easier as sunrise neared, and in one of those twilight episodes where emotion stamps its own form of reality onto dissolving shadows. A counter light, equal to what flowed through the curtains, seeped out of the jamb around a door.
She had already risen to prevail and reenact another day.
It was strange, but not: the idea of seeing his mother’s bathroom door ajar, or to imagine it, or to transpose it onto another door blearily seen from a pillow. The idea of her spending silent hours behind such a door, seeing to her toilette while morning gained dominion over a grey landscape, had been the constant beacon to the boy; although it seemed interminable months since the man last spoke to her, or saw her face emerge from its preparations. Without expecting it, comfort issued from the serenely quiet door and its vigil light.
When his mother should pass from this world, her door, contrived on the cusp of sleep, in a faraway place and in twilight, would be as close as the waking son would come in reconstructing her physical existence in the world: It would be a “somewhere” she had got to for a moment… and with the implied promise to reappear.
It was not a fairy tale to picture her behind this door preparing for her day, for her certain presence was a truth that did not flow from causality or forming daylight. It was a truth excreted from the very matter of his brain; and by a tidal moon that knew and orchestrated more than it told poets. It was the quietness of the thing—the blankness of it; where only emotion crawled halfway through its gap and attempted monosyllabic communication.
Lucien rose at the conclusion of his lucid hallucination, and dwelled sadly on it throughout his morning. Though he slept in the family house, his mother’s bedroom door had come to him from a great distance, as in some uncertain future.
Hospice workers were scheduled to visit his mother later that morning, so the son used the time to visit the coffeehouse. No car was in the driveway when he returned, but someone in a dark cloak was seen through the bay window on his approach from the sidewalk. Past the front door, the panicked son was baffled to find a caped stranger setting up a card table in the living room. “Who are you?” he bellowed.
Sporting a top hat and waxed moustache, the fellow introduced himself. “I am the magician, The Great Roldofo. I am here to perform for a children’s birthday party. This is the home of Ainsleigh Sterling?”
“Ainsleigh is my niece,“ answered the uncle. “My sister’s house is across town.”
Blythe appeared in the doorway with her walker, upon which a ceramic saucer, bearing a piece of thick-sliced bologna and several Saltines, tilted precariously inside her mesh basket. “This man is here from hospice to change the oxygen canisters,” she announced.
“The party is not here,“ Lucien told the gentleman sternly.
“My apologies,” was the prompt reply, “but this is the address I was given.”
A noisy box sat in the floor beside the performer; this drew the attention of the family dog.
“Those are my birds,” Redolfo explained. He whacked the box lid with a standard-issue magic wand and the container fell instantly silent.
“The oxygen canisters are in the guest room,” Blythe instructed her visitor politely. She took to her chair at the dining room table gingerly. A cracker dropped from her plate to the floor. Deirdre, the family Shih Tzu, was unaware of this sudden meal opportunity. She continued to scratch at the mysterious box. The lid fell open to reveal three white, perfectly dead doves inside.
This distraction was brief, but of duration for the shifty man to disappear around a potted plant in his flowing cloak. The son dashed after the intruder and found him stopped in the hall bathroom on a pretense. The faucet ran in the basin where he stood. He preemptively said, “I need to freshen my face.”
Lucien looked to the man’s hands, which were hidden under dry white cloth gloves. Moreover, his face was covered in a thin veneer of water-resistant greasepaint. The resident snapped like a twig and uttered, “Who are you?”
Redolfo turned off the faucet, establishing a note of solemnity. “I am welcomed here, and have no business with you.”
Lucien looked to where Deirdre had abandoned her interest in the birds for the crumbled cracker. Only his mother’s slippers, tucked under her dining table, were visible through this alignment of doorways. Her cough set him dashing to the end of the dim hallway, where he snatched the pull chain on the attic stairs and threw them down with a metallic screech. The birthday magician glanced out the bathroom to watch his interrogator race up into the hatch. He approached the location quizzically and ascended the ladder to find the distressed son sitting on top of a cardboard box.
“You are not a magician,” proclaimed Lucien.
“I am no thief, either,” the man answered. “I am not here to conk your mother on the head and steal her pain medication.”
“She would never invite a birthday clown into her living room.”
“I am no clown.”
“Then who are you?”
Redolfo ruminated, circuitously. “This house holds many memories. I remember your father nearly taking a spill here decades ago.” The ruminator next looked to where a plastic hose breached punctures in the attic floor. “First there was an intercom system,” he observed, “and then routers for illegal cable boxes. Now a hose supplies oxygen. What further purpose will these conduits serve?”
His cloak grazed Ernie’s dusty old HO model train set in the floor and animated its locomotive out of long dusty sleep; it chugged around the track once before derailing.
“I am a magician. See!” the gentleman declared.
“But Redolfo is not your name,” insisted Lucien.
He chortled, “A stage name, admittedly…”
The milk carton parchment slipped from Lucien’s lap and, spotting it, alarm sprang to the stranger’s face. A wince dislodged the fake moustache on his upper lip, and before it struck the floor, the imposter flew at the stairs behind him.
The resident shot to his feet and shouted, “Enoch!”
Black feathers sprang from the flung cape. Hinged wings circled the angel’s dark, glowing brow and made him suddenly too large to get through the opening to the hall floor below. “Mischief!” he bewailed.
A rush of blood made his captor swoon and falter; but Lucien had the advantage. He stated his understanding. “You are bound to me! Until I release you!”
The model train set was sent whirling around the deity in a tirade. Track and train cars decoupled and shattered against the roof timbers, turning instantly into a hail of dead leaves. “You cannot spare your mother!” snarled Death.
Pieces of the disruption settled and left the two circling one another.
“Even if I grant her a reprieve,” the angel railed, “when I am released, I will no longer be under your obligation!”
Lucien wrestled with his action, and a tidy directive was produced. “You will take me instead of my mother.”
“I am not a genie who flies by the seat of the pants! I do not make this up willy-nilly! Are you so selfish as to leave your mother in double torment? First from the pain of her bodily afflictions, and then in grief over losing a son?”
Lucien saw his shortsightedness. “You will take us together.”
“Preposterous! We cannot stay in this attic indefinitely!” A flap of wings sent tannin shards of train cars deeper into the corners. “I have other business that cannot be postponed!”
The mortal was not persuaded.
The angel made note of the box on which his captor sat, and thinking on it withdrew his opposition measuredly. “You have evidently done your homework,” he murmured, turning to where he could not escape, and then turning again as something came to him. “Our agreement (such as it is) will extend only to the particulars of your request. In the details, these are mine.”
“What are you saying?”
“I speak of a delay. A detour…”
“A detour?”
“You and I are going on a trip,” Enoch announced much too brightly.
The mortal confessed, “I am more terrified of travel than I am of you.”
“A man afraid to travel has nothing to fear with Death as a companion,” boasted the deity, “and I will settle a question for you.”
“A question?”
“The question of Daphne’s fate. I will take you to where she disappeared.”
“But what of my mother?”
“You are a smart man,” reasoned the bargainer. “Have you heard of The Quantum Zeno Effect?”
By his reaction, it was clear Lucien had not.
“It is the instance where an unstable particle, constantly observed, never decays.” The being paused in his remarks to search the floor, past the mess he made and into every room below. “A baby monitor,” leapt from his lips when his gaze lit on a downstairs closet. “In the bottom of that pile of clutter, there…”
Lucien was at a loss to recall it, but then remembered its history. “That’s from when my mother babysat her grandchild.”
“You shall leave its microphone pinned to your mother’s housecoat, and take the speaker with us. Your diligence to your mother’s state will prevent further deterioration.”
“The range of the monitor’s reception does not extend beyond the driveway,” complained the skeptic.
This earthbound logic disappointed Enoch. “Have you no faith in my powers? Why, we don’t even need to stop by CVS for batteries.”
Lucien was dubious of this scheme. “Why should I trust you?”
Enoch expounded on his idea. “Your mother talks constantly to herself since the death of your father, but you needn’t listen to her daylong jabber. This model of monitor has a noise-activated diode, which flashes when detecting sound. The volume can be turned down without interruption of the transmission.”
“I see,” responded the son, “but why are you keen on this road trip?”
The deity pulled in the tips of his wings, as if twiddling thumbs. He droned in a dirge, and recounted legality. “As I am bound to winged-ness by the imagination of Men, so too are you bound to Man’s illusion of beginnings and endings. Nothing I can say on the subject of metaphysics will placate your mind where your heart only wants a story. Gabriel’s trumpet preceded the world into the world, for the world sprang from God’s Mouth and Reverberations. Christ redeemed God’s Likeness in Men through a compelling story, and so, it is a story I will give you… a bedtime story where your mother’s beating heart is the last thing in your ear, because it was the first thing you remember in the womb.”
“I do not follow your poetics,” stated Lucien coolly. “What does any of this have to do with my mother?”
“You leave your mother as an adult so that you may return to her a child. And as you entered the world, so shall you leave it.”
The party to this agreement remained confused.
Enoch’s recalcitrance resurfaced. “To hasten our journey, I shall pay for the car’s gas!”
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.