Resuming human proportions, The Great Redolfo was allowed to give up the attic for the living room where, impatiently, he watched his charge toss scant travel accoutrements into a suitcase, and then the luggage into the backseat of his mother’s Lumina.
“Where are you going?” Blythe inquired from the dining table, nibbling the last her protracted and untidy meal.
“Away, briefly,” the son told her.
Before her osteoporosis, his interminable adolescent mind imagined his mother’s body to be a bulwark against all dangers, but now he could only throw his arms around the boney mollusk of her shoulders and weep. “I love you, Momma,” he cried into the thick terrycloth collar of her housecoat. “There is nothing in my life that you did not give me.”
Blythe stiffened against the onslaught of tears, staring past her son to where the caped gentleman stood in the entryway. “It is for the best that you do this,” she said, “and know that your Momma loves you.”
She slipped some money into his pocket, as much as she had on her. “You will be hungry by dinner.”
The travelers stepped under the carport after the delay, got in the car, and backed slowly into the street. Blythe stood at the ornamental glass door facing her yard of bottle green, and watched her son stop halfway up the block to adjust his rearview mirror; she perhaps weep with him in the reflection.
This was likely the way it would end between them, with him leaving the house—not for an hour but for critical months. This was likely the last image the live-away son would have of his living mother: standing in her open doorway behind an ornamental glass door. How this tragic moment would come for his sister, he could not say, since it could not be predicted or reproduced with such fidelity as his. He lived this farewell in a parade of endless dress rehearsals, knowing its last occurrence would be the unannounced performance. Each parting was the final parting, though always staged, by agreement, as a temporary separation. It was in the way of someone stepping momentarily out of a room, with no form of leave-taking or words of goodbye.
A world fell away, and by the time Lucien hit the Exxon station on Graham, and then the onramp of Sam Cooper Boulevard, another universe insinuated itself between mother and child. The baby monitor was placed on the dashboard where its red light murmured agreeably.
Angel and mortal drove to Whitten Road, which was out of their way. Lucien circled his father’s headstone under the shadow of the aerial tower with a travel prayer. In coming back onto the divided boulevard, a transformer station lay across from the marble cherubim, squawking geese, and cultivated pond. It struck him as both desolate and mysterious that this frequent coupling of eyesore infrastructure and manicured cemetery so often occurred in undeveloped urban borderland. His father had been an electrician; and this was apropos of something.
The travelers doubled back down I-240 and over the Mississippi River. They would not stop again until nothing on the landscape was familiar and aching.
The Ozarks lay north of I-40 and, just shy of Fort Smith, Arkansas, a detour was scheduled from one of Lucien’s pinned Google Earth destinations.
Dinosaur World was closed for years, and was reported to have the largest mural of Noah’s Ark ever completed before arson and finances ended its exhibition. Crudely painted bipeds and quadrupeds, still settled among the misty foothills of The White River, proved to be the draw here.
This hour’s diversion mystified Enoch, as the abandoned attraction was more primitive than what it purported to depict. Cavemen of crumbling cement and rebar shared an anachronistic setting with malformed dinosaurs (of no pedigree). A rapid expansion westward had left this Paleolithic tribute intact, and before ions of sediment could see to its proper interment.
For his part, Lucien was already gazing in the indicated direction, past a horizon littered with plastic cup lids and coffee stir sticks. Power lines, having paced the car since Memphis, swooped down a slope pruned of its trees. A pterodactyl might have once followed a similar declivity, though over less disappointment.
Clouds greeted the adventurers at the state line, yet misled in their sun-curled smiles. Features of faces formed and dissolved in the billows, and suggested nothing of souring weather ahead.
“The Likeness of God,“ mumbled the driver.
Enoch’s glance shot across the console.
Lucien continued, “You mentioned something of winged men, of mortal likeness. I see faces everywhere, in cracking paint and fake marble tile along highway bathrooms. I feel a watchful gaze, always.”
The angel said nothing.
The conversationalist, seeking stimulation, thrust a riposte through the windshield. “Evolutionary psychology says Man’s tendency to discern faces and animal forms in his surroundings emerges from ancient coding in his brain, where, in prehistoric times, urgent need required him to identify friend or foe on a hostile and changing landscape. A face seen in a bush could have meant life or death.”
The companion pondered the point of the dry description. “To what do you tend?”
“Can this trait, in having outlived its original use, be dismissed as the product of an overactive imagination?”
“If everything in human experience ends with a practical explanation,” concluded the angel with equally arid language.
“Clearly you do not see this,” deduced Lucien.
Enoch maintained his inscrutable expression.
The driver followed the implication. “If God speaks to us in unconventional ways, as with seeing Mother Teresa’s face appearing in a dinner roll, then aren’t these occasions ripe for mischief?”
Lucien’s flippancy did not impose on the archangel’s solitude. “God does not wield lightning bolts lex talionis to impress nonbelievers and skeptics. Subtlety is His Preferred Mode of Discourse in all He does. His vocabulary is composed of nuances.”
“So God is limited to rearranging coat hangers in a closet to get our attention?”
The angel resisted this characterization of his remark. “Physics rules the linear world. Where all becomes molecular, all is bound to its choreography. Your relationship with God is of a different dance, where one changes one’s outcome as an understanding. Fate is fate, but destiny is understanding that one is no longer a slave to limited interpretations.”
“I agree. It is subtle. Too subtle for me to follow,” commented Lucien. “A few well-placed thunderbolts might make God’s intentions more apparent.”
Enoch urged, “Do not doubt that God knows where each lightning bolt is placed, and where each sparrow falls. Subtlety, should one side with the modest sloganeer, requires one to abandon imperfect reason for imperfect poetry.”
Lucien struggled with the gradation. “Don’t we abandon reason at our peril? Theologians have been burned too many times since Galileo to want to conflate faith and reason.”
“Abandon is perhaps too strong a word,” allowed the angel. “The segregation between Faith and Reason is formal; though, truthfully, this bright line made more sense when the world was simpler. Learned men were more certain about what they knew when they knew less. The big ideas of early productive science were vital and persuasive. They were so compelling that they permitted scientists to paper over whatever difficulties remained: Some day, it was reasoned, the gaps would be filled in, yet contrarily, as it turns out, the more Man takes things apart, the more complicated the parts become; and the more impossible their simple assembly appears on analysis. The Industrial Age was built on bedrock that has proved to be a kind of ‘necessary fiction’ on examination.”
Lucien played Devil’s advocate. “The Periodic Table is not fiction—no more than The Standard Model in physics.”
“The Standard Model is perhaps closer to fiction than The Periodic Table,” argued the lecturer. “No one has laid an actual quark on a kitchen table among the butter knives. Still, you are mostly right, though one is either happy with the completion with the cutlery set or one is not. The discontents have run out of answers long before they ran out of questions. Reason gropes in the dark with fingers made of Faith. Yet what the fertile imagination seeks through its imagining, unprofessed to itself, is nothing less than to end itself.”
The driver looked beyond the shoulder of the road, past where perfectly black asphalt turned into white snow. Occasionally a deer carcass came into view to bloody the immaculate monotony, although the baby monitor pulsed like its still-beating heart on the dashboard.
His mother was frail, despite her vigorous protest to the contrary. She would never permit her son to coddle her, or cut her meat, or perceive what was inevitable in her state. Still, to hold a vested idea in his head was a talent an autistic easily implemented, and in the way a worrywart imagines his strenuous worrying about the stability of wings on an in-flight airplane keeps them attached to the fuselage. His concentrated energies endeavored to keep the world from collapsing around his ears, and while it was in his power to transfer this energy to his mother, he would keep her heart and lungs working.
Yet his brain could not dwell endlessly on anguish, and so he wondered aloud, “If God is good, and keeps track of everything, then why allow despair in the world? Or evil? Why do the good suffer while the bad prosper? Where is the fairness in it?”
The archangel was less eager to wade into this quagmire, so summarized. “To suppose a thing like ‘fairness’ is the first clue: An emperor’s golden yardstick is required to frame the question. It must exists somewhere, if only for the time it takes to beat God about the Head and Neck with it. One is halfway to a solution in taking up this paradox as a weapon.”
“But does that answer my question?”
The preamble required a reset; Enoch shifted his cloak. He would be the first to confess that dramatic gestures were to show too much deference to three-dimensional space, of which, as a construct, he merely tolerated as a seraph.
Snatching at his mood, he intoned, “There is a door, yet those witnessing others coming on it see only an end, in a kingdom of ends. It is torturous to believe there are only ends where, truly, there are only doors. God races ahead of consequence, and if He does not set every broken stem to right, then it is to give His children no more than they can bear before they too see not an end but a door. I speak not only of Myself and what I bring, but of many doors of a lesser order through which mortals pass; and whose design and purpose cannot be known. God dwells behind each in small and big ways, as each is a death and a resurrection. His Mercy does not reside in ends, but doors. His Redemption dwells there complete, as every breath drawn, whether in sweet repose or undeserved misfortune, bears the sting of separation from what lies on the other side of our un-seeing.
One might call birth the true tragedy, whose misery is broken up by soupçons of bread, wine, and song. Yet why should Man celebrate if he does not believe it a rehearsal? In some cultures it is no small matter for an infant’s feet to make first contact with earth. It is a ritual of passage, where a deity surrenders a perfect understanding to enter The Realm of Doors. Even the cynic, who sees no value in praising a cruel God who allows a child into this world, moves on feet… and in the general direction of doors.”
“Is this related to Original Sin?” bleated Lucien. “This mis-measure of doors?”
“Yours is the imperfect recollection of Divinity, refracted through a dimensional haze,” clarified the higher authority (speaking from his personal experience in once being human). “Knowledge—of things front to back, or in and of themselves—is Man’s Sisyphean labor to reassemble: His attempt to reconstruct a Divine Recollection as an ongoing terrestrial project.
And yet, the break in Eden was clean, and sin is a form of memory loss about Paradise. It is residual in Man’s DNA, and persists in gestures if not honest intellect. This amnesia makes all men hoarders of facts: They are methodically gathered from battlefields like so many trophy ears and scalps.
But one is just as likely to stitch together a Frankenstein as Truth from these artifacts. ‘Facts’ are merely the obedient children of framing devices. They cannot return from the grave with reliable reports. Knowledge cannot escape its in-laws and relations. Even where it expresses the purest intentions, family obligations remain.”
“Yet it is the prospect of Heaven on Earth that urges us on,” argued the listener.
The angel smiled; truer words were never said. “It is not the seeking of knowledge that lands one in trouble. Adam and Eve were punished for their selfishness, because what they sought in eating the fruit of the tree was not knowledge but power. What Adam and Eve did not understand was that they were already in full possession of the Truth before they set about to carve it up between them.” The teacher tarried at the rostrum to add, “Where the sinner comes to God in supplication, and with earnest questions, God will give him sight before demanding Faith.”
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