Page 33 of Angel Down

and when he’s emptied of tears, he turns toward the narthex and sees the angel standing there, and is unsurprised to find that she is six stories tall, halo like Saturn’s rings, dress the red curtain of a theater, knees at balcony level, and he’s also unsurprised that she holds a massive medieval sword, the tip stabbed into a pew, the polished blade, the hilt of obsidian, the pommel bright as the moon, if not an actual moon,

and, of course, the church isn’t large, never was, yet the angel hasn’t crashed through the roof, the roof is gone, the church walls simply go up and up, and though it’s hard for Bagger to say for sure in the night-sky dark, the plaster, brick, and wood appear to twist and twine into a towering jungle canopy, the stained glass redispersed into the glimmering beaks, claws, and scales of unspecified jungle life-forms,

and Bagger has to squint, the angel’s face is hard to see way up there, for once she exudes no light,

and Bagger asks, “Was that you? At Mons?” and the angel replies, “Mons is a fairy tale. None of you understand time. What does it matter which nations win which wars? Future wars will reverse all gains. God is on no one’s side,”

and it’s foolish to do anything but fall to his knees and beg for grace, but maybe it’s being back in the church, maybe it’s the mystery of the jungle beyond, but Bagger asks, “How can you say that? There’s right and there’s wrong,” and to this, the angel raises an eyebrow the size of a howitzer and replies, “You ask me that? You, who has never cared for anyone?,”

and the ghost congregation chuckles, and Bagger, angry now, demands, “How many times did I save you? Three? Four? I risked my life. Over and over I risked it!,” and the angel retorts with a temper this time, “You wanted to save who you saw. The same as the others. None of it was for the good of anyone but yourselves,”

and though Bagger wants to make the angel tell him about Arno’s impending death, as foretold by Rochambeau, and how to avoid it, indignation pulses inside his empty socket, “My father used to talk about the Destroying Angel,” he says, and he stomps the kneeler bar of the closest pew, snapping it off, “He said the Destroying Angel could kill thousands with the flick of the sword,” his father loved that word, flick, he’d pair it with a flick of his finger to illustrate the ease of mass murder, and Bagger javelins the kneeler bar at a window,

and the stained glass shatters into kaleidoscopes, and vines flop through the breach, vines that seem to thread through his veins, did Bagger weave the jungle, or did the jungle weave Bagger, and he looks up at the angel and demands, “So why don’t you do what Veck asked? Stop messing around and wipe us out?,”

and the sword, all fifty feet of it, turns in the angel’s fist, a minute gesture that nonetheless grinds a pew to splinters, a pew Bagger’s father used to varnish on his bloody knees, which must mean Bagger’s getting to her, good, maybe she will end this endless nightmare, but instead the angel asks, with aggravating patience, “How did your father say the end would come?,”

and the old man might as well be back at his pulpit, the answer springs automatic from of Bagger, “A divine plague,”

and the angel responds with nothing, her eyes two boulders dangling over Bagger’s grape head, and Bagger recalls his father inserting silences like this to make his guilty audience squirm, but being aware of the tactic doesn’t make Bagger less susceptible to it, and after a few seconds, his own squirming begins,

and the reason is the flu, the one army leaders insist is contained to neutral Spain, though the letters doughboys get from home paint a darker picture, one of churches, ballrooms, barracks, and gymnasiums full of sufferers writhing on cots beside nurses whose white masks cover the only helpful tool they have, their pretty, sympathetic faces, and of undertakers sneezing sawdust from so many coffins being built, and of cemeterians pink-handed from covering corpses with ice, where’s the quicklime when you need it,

and the ice freezes Bagger, too, there’s no known origin of the plague, the plague on track to kill more people than any silly war,

and here’s a thought to scare off sleep, imagine this, a squadron of angels soaring over Bois de Fays in an attack formation called Revelations, what if this angel was midwifing the missile to end all missiles when she was shot down, and that by saving the angel, Bagger has only ensured the resumption of her mission, the end of humankind, and if that’s true, it begs a question, the only question left, probably the only question that ought to be asked of a visitor like her,

and so Bagger asks it, “Why?,”

and the angel’s cunning grin is so paradoxical to her former modesty that Bagger’s blood goes gelid, the old church a polar tundra beneath the sultry swamp, and as he cradles his goose-bumped arms, the angel vanishes, but for only a blink, then she’s back and says, “I have returned,” and to his confusion she laughs as you laugh at a dog that doesn’t recognize its master in a new hat, and says, “I told you that you have no understanding of time. I have been gone for sixty thousand years,”

and Bagger only stares, unable to grapple with a declaration so mad, and the angel says, “It has been approved. I am allowed to show you why. But I warn you, once we begin, we must see it through. There will be no going back. No chances to look away. What you will witness will haunt you until your final moments. You will regret wanting to know. And yet, when I ask you if you truly want to be shown, you will say, ‘Show me.’ No human has ever been able to leave a box unopened. So I ask it, Would you like to be shown?,”

and Bagger believes there is nothing in life, possibly in death as well, that he loathes so much as doing what’s expected of him, and his every particle galvanizes to reply a resounding no, do not open the box, do not pluck the fruit, do not look back at Sodom, until he accepts that he shares his ancestors’ blood and recrudesces with their ills, which leaves nothing but to look up into the jungle, defeated and doomed, but at least aware of it, which has to count for something,

and he says, just as the angel predicted, “Show me,”

XLII

and the floorboards fold down on hinges and screws and swivels that don’t exist, braiding into a whirlpool of lumber, a black cavity that falls like a bomb all the way to earth, driving into the trench and then further, into the body of mud, the heart of clay, the dead soldiers buried by landships and gun wagons and millions of boots in melee, bedfellows to ritualistically buried ancient humans, and forgotten dinosaurs, and the single-cell organisms that started it all, each stratum more innocent than the one above it, and yet shooting downward from each buried body are stems twining together to form a root as thick as an arm, a leg, a torso, a body, a house, a town, a country, until the root is not a part of the planet’s mantle but the planet itself and Bagger, cupped inside the angel’s free hand, is inside that root, utterly dark, until he notices a mist, swirling like Argonne fog but crimson, lit by a fire at Earth’s core, and Bagger’s afraid now, but nothing can stop them, they pass through a cloud that stinks of scorched kerosene and tastes like motor oil, stinging Bagger’s empty socket, and there it is, the center of the world, not rock or magma or primordial ether but an engine, sixty thousand wheels, gears, blades, pulleys, pistons, and pumps in calamitous clatter, hot air shrieking from chimney whistles, soot coughing from behind the blistered teeth of metal grills, an intricate labyrinth of puffing, chugging, gasping, hacking machinery arranged around a flywheel cauldron into which the master root feeds, all of Earth’s murdered smelted into tar, scorching and bubbling but fanned by wheezing bellows of sheet metal before being sucked down the mazy throats of corroded pipes, each elbow so tenuously bolted it bleeds black lifeblood muck, a continuous draining action that powers a great windmill of threadbare cams and rotors reptiled with generations of spindrifted blood, and rolling from the firebrick of a throbbing, banging oven are tray after tray, chainmailed together, of human tar cooled to an ebony gelatin, knobby with bone, cartilage, and gristle, and with a factory honk and a puff of xanthous smoke, dozens of rusty guillotine blades drop in unison with the ungodly cymbal of overturned silverware drawers, dicing the inky jelly into thousands of patties of rubbery pulp, which luge down a slide of ludicrous design, careening all about the infernal machine, the steel support rods planted into undergirding oil pans whining with each bend until the slide abruptly ends and the jiggling black cakes shoot into a chicken-wire bin studded by crooked nozzles that shoot flatus of anhydrous powder, coating the gelatin in off-white spoor, and when the accumulated weight trips a trigger, the bin screams downward on frayed elevator cables that sway like black gallows until it locks in place atop railroad spikes and dumps its contents into a tin tank floored with a jerky, clacking conveyer belt that bounces the material along, a transport that reminds Bagger of the entry conduit of Iowa slaughterhouses right down the bars that spread apart livestock legs, only here the bars route the black gel into an aluminum matrix drilled with holes, and Bagger watches as the patties are shoved into a hotbox of tunnels that iris smaller and smaller, rounding the blobby goo into smooth black cylinders that drop, like rabbit poop, out the tank’s other side and into an oxidized gutbucket that spins on sheaved sockets like a centrifuge, if not the original centrifuge, aged and wobbly and thumping, its underside papuled from the blue flames that sibilate from a cauterized vent, and the black cylinders harden until it sounds as if the bucket is filled with teeth, and it’s this dryness, Bagger thinks, that sets off the bray of a timer, which triggers the bucket to upend with a jack-in-the-box twang, hurling its contents into the most frightening piece of machinery Bagger’s ever seen, a long, gray, greasy grid of stone grinding wheels, hundreds upon hundreds, snagging whichever end of each cylinder lands first and, with a piercing shrill, shaving that end to a point, the fountains of yellow sparks forming a feverish marquee, and just as Bagger feels his eardrums bleed from the decibelic insult, a huge gray monolith, chipped and pitted from billions of strikes and twitching with diaphragmed tubing, swivels via pneumatic post, magnets the pointed cylinders onto it, then rotates vertically, setting off a series of moldy overhead spigots that squirt white cooling liquid amid a dragon’s huff of steam, and though Bagger recoils from the scalding cloud, his one eye observes the cylinders, one by one, wash from the magnetized slab and rain down into brass clockwork, each cylinder slotting into the chambers of what looks like a rotary dial, each tick of the dial like the rolling action of a revolver, a detail that makes Bagger so cold his perspiration steams in the diabolical heat, the dead, all the dead ever slain in war’s killing fields, have been forged into bullets, flesh and blood recycled into ammo, for once you see enough human bodies broken into pieces, insensate arms and legs and heads, it’s simple to rethink them as fodder, Genesis incorrect after all, life doesn’t beget life, it’s death that begets death, so foundational a principle it has become civilization’s engine, an inferno of grief that, nut by screw by rivet, is refashioned into outrage and hysteria and vengeance and moral polarity, a cycle perfected by the so-called War to End All Wars, which, Bagger understands with horror, is really the War to Begin All Wars, countries carved into furious parcels and technology matured to a stage of perpetual regeneration, an entire industrial complex, the hatreds of one age inherited by the next, the next, the next, broadcasted, promulgated, and liked via glass screens yet to be invented but inside which we see our barbarity reflected, and Bagger knows what’s coming and doesn’t want to see, yet feels the angel’s arm swoop him sideways so he must behold the gun, the Brobdingnagian gun, the titanic, breathtaking, wondrous, bewildering, obscene, detestable, venomous, ferocious, world-destroying gun, the size of a redwood, leveled upon cast-iron wheels that could trample entire countries, no BAR, no P3, no Hotchkiss, no Bergmann-Schmeisser, no Stokes, no Jack Johnson, no Big Bertha, no A7V, no Beutepanzer wagon, no Renault, no Mark IV, no Fokker, no Sopwith Camel, no Albatros, nothing could equal this deranged patchwork cannon of brass, steel, wood, and leather, a buzzing, clanking, coughing device that inhales through throbbing plastic hoses and exhales through valves jointed like a suit of armor, the smoothbore barrel whirring with fans on serrated axels, dog springs plunging to lock iron pyrite jaws, hammers like Thor’s mjölnir and ramrods like Athena’s spear stoking a muzzle so big it is filled with uncountable other muzzles in constant Gatling rotation, while a hotwired ticker-tape machine tap-tap-taps a blood-spatter language on carbon paper that loops like innards over the weapon’s inlaid bone and gilded steel, all of it engraved with the scrivenings of the homicidal, the church-bell gleam of the gun disrupted only by the black snow of wafting gunpowder, yet despite all of this there’s no rigamarole before it fires, it simply fires, the glib effortlessness of its operation the most horrid thing of all, no one has to suffer the gun burning their palms or watch bones splinter or brains spew, no one must feel guilt, it’s the future of warfare, even a soldier as feckless as Bagger recognizes that, and he watches the projectile shoot through space, passing a series of other engines still being built from the earliest and most cursed of innovations, saltpeter, charcoal, sulfur, and internal combustion, engines that will be ready for the next war, the next, the next, a metal blimp being constructed inside a mushroom-cloud haze, stylish personal assault rifles with bottomless magazines produced at a scale necessary to satisfy global demand, pilotless planes capable of murdering hundreds of people hundreds of miles from their emotionally disengaged operators, and artificial men instilled with artificial brains, no telling what kind of hell they prefer, and from the rafters of this dark place drop wooden marionettes, hanged proxies of the future dead, and a shocking few of them look like doughboys, or Huns, or Frogs, or Russkies, they hail from places Bagger only knows for how the dead announce themselves with off-stage shrieks, Iraqi, Turkish, Kurdish, Chinese, Ethiopian, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Indian, Colombian, Burmese, Korean, Algerian, Sudanese, Angolan, Filipino, Indonesian, Laotian, Cuban, Iranian, Sri Lankan, Somali, Rwandan, Bosnian, Burundi, Mexican, Nigerian, Syrian, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Israeli, Palestinian, tens of million shredded, poisoned, tortured, deformed, mutilated, incinerated, melted, and just plain blown away, and Bagger prays to God, to the opposite of God, to anyone or anything, for it to end, but sorry, sucker, it’s not even close, the next puppets that drop tremble like Ben Veck and stick gun barrels or bottles of rotgut down their throats, and they beat up smaller puppets, a chain of traumatic violence that spirals onward, a cast of millions that Bagger sees, as the stage lights shift, are lodged inside pitched ravines, the trenches of the Great War evolved into the entrenchments of ideology, of hatreds and superiorities and vanities and comforts and riches, most of all riches, whole races subjugated for the convenience of entitled others, a cruelty worse than any Bagger has seen in this war, because it’s all for nothing, the game is fixed, the same way he fixed every game he played with others, and Bagger feels a vertiginous tug as the angel stands, or flies, higher and higher, until the rotten core of the world, as well as the world itself, shrinks to a ball, and only at this scale can Bagger see that Earth is a naked giant balled up in agony, shot in the stomach, the drops of her blood coagulating into ill-fated galaxies, she won’t live forever, and Bagger wonders, screaming now, if the giant’s corpse will end up buried, too, and fed into a bigger engine that forges bullets capable of sundering the fabric of existence until everything in heaven, too, is a No Man’s Land, a telling phrase, a Land With No Men, or at least what men have represented till now, the slavering instinct to conquer, a momentum unstoppable unless some hero jams the hardest detritus he can find into the machine he helped create, break the cogs and overheat the engine, and accept being burned alive in the resulting explosion, thereby inspiring everyone else toward heroism, too, the same self-sacrifice of Mr. and Mrs. Bagger, which might graduate into blanket nonviolence, an impossible dream, yet what else could be the point of being shown this, by chorusing Save me, the angel tried to get Bagger to save anything other than himself, to make it a habit, and do so without throwing more gas into the furnace, You must promise never to take another’s life for as long as you live, at last Bagger feels the angel’s soft palm fold over his body, closing him off from the terror of another trip through space and time, until he is delicately deposited onto a floor, the smell of which tells him he’s in the trench dugout again, the trounced walls whispering the deal the angel offered and he accepted, If you fail in this promise, a catastrophe beyond imagination will consume your entire world, though now he gets the joke, it wasn’t a vow but a condition that already exists, the angel only did exactly what Bagger asked of it, with rock, with paper, with scissors, what they all asked, with Theda, with Effie, with Naomi, with Ma Arno, the angel’s as much a machine as the underworld engine, though she might still give humanity a reprieve if Bagger turns his back on all of it, refuses to be a cog, refuses to be a bullet, if he just walks away as Bagger’s father walked away, no matter how badly it goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitching hurts,

XLIII

and when the world’s engine restarts, it does so gradually, a crotchety thingamajig, and in that elongated first second, Bagger opens the last eye he’ll ever own and sees the reserve trench overhead sag into the bombarded dugout, where he currently stands, right arm outstretched, the .45 aimed at the back of its owner’s head, Reis ignorant of being the target, his torso in full torque about to deliver the blow that will kill Lewis Arno, who, visibly concussed, plum-skinned with macerations, blood condensing through his skin, still clings to the angel with his last paroxysms of muscle,

and the angel looks right at Bagger in calm curiosity over which option he will choose, one, break his vow, shoot the megalomaniac, save the kid, and damn the world, or two, let the kid die, climb from the dugout, defect from the front, get collared, and spend the rest of his life under the penumbra of the worst of dishonorable discharges,

and the characters begin moving again, the walking stick revved to quarter-speed, half-speed, blood from Arno’s mouth drooping like wax, then molasses, then milk, and for a flash, Bagger entertains a third option, putting however many bullets are left into the angel, how about that, except Bagger’s certain bullets won’t pierce her skin, just as Jerry’s bullets failed to pierce Solly Madonna, and there’s also the fact that shooting the angel won’t prevent Arno’s death, Reis will finish him off regardless,

and then there’s no time left to think, and, in fact, he can’t think, his brain’s erased, all he’s got left is heart,

and so Bagger does what he’s always done with cards, dice, dominos, a poker chip hidden under one of three bottle caps, but rarely, if ever, done fairly, he gambles, an honest gamble, no thumb on the roulette wheel, everything placed on red, and though the world may be damned as a result, what’s the world even worth without the one person Bagger wants in it,

and so to hell with it, he shoots,

and the hair at the back of Reis’s head flutes outward playfully, like a Marie-Louise blowing on Bagger to wake him up, only Reis won’t ever wake up, there’s an emphysemic crack like a man expiring from a flu, perhaps a Spanish one, and globs of tissue spray at a wide angle over the dugout corner, a storm of blood as bright as any artillery barrage, rinds of skull tumbling like cups of pulped brain, while tabs of skin, pink on one side, red on the other, flap through the air like wet doves, including a strip of skin containing Reis’s Van Dyke, which glues to Arno’s back,

and the walking stick falls from Reis’s brand-new hand, then Reis, too, falls like a sheet, as if his ejected skull took the rest of his skeleton with it, and this leaves Bagger with a clear view of the angel, Arno in sole possession now, and she blinks up at Bagger, surprised, perhaps even impressed, it takes a certain size of balls to condemn one’s own species,