Angel of Death

FOURTEEN

When Donna and Doctor Gross arrived for their next interview, Azra lay abed in St Mary of Mercy. He slept. The head of his bed was raised, and the fluorescent reading light flickered, otherworldly, above his bowed head of black hair.

Two guards were in the room. Men in blue. They crouched, red-eyed, in their chairs. In low tones, they had been talking of the school referendum up for vote in a few days. At intervals, they regarded the prisoner, strapped to his bed – bandages, sheets, and restraints all merging into glowing robes.

“Hi, I’m Gary Gross, the psychiatrist,” said the doctor to the guards. His teal shirt had been replaced with mauve, but otherwise he wore the same non-uniform he had worn before. “This is Detective Donna Leland, citizen advocate of the accused.”

The two deputies looked up a moment from their discussion, and the one with a mustache nodded. “Let’s see some ID.”

Dr. Gross fished for his wallet while, sweet and weary, Donna Leland dug in her tweed jacket. “I’m Detective Leland of the Burlington Police, the one who tracked him down. I’d like you to wait outside. I can handle him. There’s only one door to the room, and a five-story drop to the parking lot outside the windows. He’s not getting away.”

Shrugging reluctantly, the older guard handed the two IDs back to the cop and the shrink, picked up a clipboard, brought it to Leland, and said, “Sign here. If he gets away, he’s your responsibility.”

She signed. “Always has been.”

Doctor Gross passed them, approaching the accused. Azra had become thin and sinewy. The corners of his eyes were tightly pinched – the corners of his lips, too. Despite all his talk of angels, despite the media speculation of demons, Azra looked increasingly human. Frail. Confused. Betrayed by even his own mind. He was ceasing to be Azra Michaels and was becoming William B. Dance.

Doctor Gross sat, settling his legal pad and Bics on the bedside table. On the opposite side of the bed, Donna pulled up a chair. The psychiatrist reached gently toward Dance. “Wake up, Azra. It’s Gary. Donna’s here, too. We’d like to speak to you again.”

The prisoner’s eyelids slid slowly upward, fluttered for a moment, and then stared fixedly at the cart by the foot of the bed. He gave no notice of the doctor or Donna.

“Sorry to wake you,” Doctor Gross said, withdrawing his hand.

Azra turned his dream-clouded eyes toward him. A weak smile came to his face. “Good morning, Father.”

“I am not a priest,” said Gross gently. “I’m a psychiatrist. Doctor Gary, remember?”

Azra blinked in affirmation. “That’s what I meant. I’m not used to waking up.”

Donna leaned in with a small frown, her hand settling on his bandaged thumb. “Give yourself a moment. A lot has happened.” She was trembling, and her eyebrows knitted above bloodshot eyes. “Once you’re ready, we’d like to talk to you.”

“Yes,” said Azra, stretching as best he could within the constraints. “Hello, Donna. I’ve been dreaming of you.”

“Good dreams, I hope,” she replied, her voice trembling now, too. “No nightmares.”

Azra’s eyes clouded slightly. “I guess I’m awake enough for questions.”

“Good,” Doctor Gross said, paging through the scribbled legal pad. “I’ve been reviewing the notes from our discussion – is it all right for me to take notes again today?”

“Yes, fine.”

“A lot has happened since we spoke last. For one, of course, your wallet was found, and your ID checked out – a whole life for William B. Dance.”

“That’s not me. Derek must have made up that name, that past, used computer programmers, you know. Punks-”

Doctor Gross gave a slow shrug. “If so, the punks did a darned thorough job. We found your – sorry, William’s – grade school records; an excellent student. And his driver’s permit at fifteen, and Marines enrollment documents.”

“But what about high school? What about immunization? What about paper records, not just computer records? It isn’t a very complete history, is it?”

“There are holes, sure, but that’s the nature of paperwork. Everybody’s got an incomplete-”

“He did a good job.”

“He?”

“Derek Billings.”

“Yes, that’s the other big thing that has happened. Your friend, Mr Billings – you killed him. Why?”

“Yes,” broke in Donna, a desperate light in her face.

“Why?”

Azra turned toward her, his eyes seeming to shrink back into his skull. Despite their diminishment, Donna could see herself reflected, huddled and expectant, in them.

He chewed his lip before saying, “Well, I killed him because it was his time. I’ve always known when it’s somebody’s time. I killed him because he deserved a good death. I wanted to prove I was ready to be an angel again. I wanted God to forgive me.”

“He didn’t,” Donna noted flatly.

“I know.”

“You’re human, Azra,” she said, almost pleading.

“You can’t escape it. You need to stop trying. You need to pull a defense together. You need to figure out some way to live.”

Doctor Gross broke in. “All right. I’d like to explore this a little further. In your confession, you said that when you killed Mr Billings, you put aside your human feelings of – for instance – friendship and compassion, to achieve the divine end of assuring an appropriate death?”

“Yes,” Azra replied, turning toward him.

“In the other murder cases – the newspaperman, the priest, and so forth – did you put aside your human emotions then, too?”

“Keith McFarland killed them. I only oversaw. And besides, I didn’t even have human emotions then.”

“When did you start having human emotions?”

“When I fell in love with Donna,” said Azra, glancing toward her.

Donna looked away.

“Ah, yes, we talked about that. Well, what about when you killed – sorry, when you arranged for the police to kill Keith McFarland? You said you were already in human form when that happened. Did you have to put aside your human emotions then?”

Azra leaned his head back on the rumpled sheets. Blue lines of fluorescence radiated down his dark hair.

“If I remember – that is something else I was not prepared for, how bad mortal memories are – I exulted in Keith’s death. I had watched him kill so many people, and he was such a mess. He is certainly better off dead.”

“Why is that?”

“Keith’s life was tragic. He was never truly happy or truly in control of himself unless he was killing, or enjoying the fruits of killing.”

“How do you know that? Did he tell you?”

“We didn’t particularly speak. He heard my voice sometimes, I know, but he didn’t respond.”

“Did you enjoy killing and the fruits of killing?”

“‘Enjoy’ is a mortal term. It implies a needy and desirous body. I did not enjoy killing, except for killing Keith – which was when I had a body. I appreciated a well-planned death, but did not enjoy killing until Keith.”

Donna released a despairing moan.

“Did you enjoy killing Derek?”

Again, the question seemed to surprise Azra. “I suppose I did. I certainly felt it. I hadn’t expected to feel it so strongly, getting my thumb bitten off.”

“The ER nurses said there was semen in your underwear when you were brought in.”

Azra breathed, taking in that information. “Semen?”

“It was your semen, Azra.”

His face looked sickly white. “Forgive me. This is a shock to me.”

“It was a shock to them, too. What do you think it means that you ejaculated in your underwear?”

“It means I was sexually aroused.”

Doctor Gross wrote. “Why would killing another person arouse you?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right.” He flipped through his notes. “All right. I’m going to walk you through your description of the murder, right from the confession you gave to the police. Tell me at each step how aroused you felt, or how aroused you feel at each moment while we talk about it.”

“All right.”

“First, during the day, you asked a cell mate for a penny – Mr Joseph Lawrence. He gave you one. You said you knew then that you would use it to suffocate Mr Billings. How much arousal did you feel when you got the penny?”

“None. I just put it in my pocket.”

“Okay, then you waited for night, when Billings was asleep. You said you were thinking about how the killing would go. How aroused were you during that time?”

“Not at all.”

In encouragement, Donna patted his bandaged hand.

“Once you were sure he slept, you crawled down off your bunk. You had the top bunk. You climbed down and stood by his bedside, looking at him.”

“I remember a tightness… down here. I did not recognize it then. I remember the pocket where the penny was – the pocket felt loose, like it was pushed out.”

“You held the penny between your index finger and thumb, then slid it into his mouth and straddled him.”

“My heart was pounding. There was an exciting ache. Yes. I was excited.”

“You jammed the penny in his throat, and he struggled. He bit off your thumb. You saw your own thumb in his mouth. You lifted your hand and cupped the other hand over it. He was choking on your thumb, squirming beneath you.”

“Perhaps that was when the semen got in my underwear.”

“Did you want to do anything more, then?” Doctor Gross looked up, gauging Donna’s reaction. She was fervid and trembling.

“No. I don’t know what I wanted to do. It felt frightening and good.”

“Oh, Azra,” Donna said, revulsion and despair on her face.

“All right. So, you got up from the bunk and went to tell Lawrence to call for a guard. What did you feel then?”

“My hand was hurting. I don’t remember anything else.”

“So, was it the killing that excited you, or putting your thumb into his mouth?”

“I don’t know. Both. Now I understand Keith a little better.”

“Do you think it is natural to have these feelings?”

“What do you mean, natural? Do you mean part of God’s plan – or sin?”

“Do you think God wants humans to have these feelings when they kill? Do you think it’s sin?”

“I don’t know. God knows when all things are to be born and when they are to die, and you can’t be born without having to someday face death, and you can’t die without something killing you. God wants mortals to die, yes – and he wants them to have sex. I do not know if he wants them to connect the two.”

“Do you feel any guilt, remorse, or shame for having killed Derek or Keith?”

“Yes,” Azra said. “At first, I felt sorry for him, for Derek. I apologized to him while I was killing him. And now, now that I know it was not a test from God, now that I know about the wallet and the records – whether Derek made it up or it is all true – I feel bad. I feel guilt. I wish I hadn’t killed him.”

“Let’s get back to Keith. Why did you choose to assist his slayings?”

“He chose to kill, and I had to assure the killings were fitting – just.”

“How is it fitting and just for a young priest to be killed in a confessional on Christmas Eve?”

“How is it not just?”

“Shouldn’t good folk live long, happy lives and die quietly in their sleep?”

“No. That is not what God does. Good people often die young and bad people often live to old age.”

“Where is the justice in that?” Donna demanded.

“Justice is each person getting his or her due. Every mortal will die, so avoiding death entirely would be unjust for humans, right?”

“But how is a gentle priest due a violent death?” she insisted.

“He followed Christ, did he not? At the moment of Christ’s birth – Christmas Day – it was known he must die, must be crucified. How is it wrong that the follower of a young martyr be martyred young?”

Donna was stunned by that response. Doctor Gross also seemed caught off-guard. He didn’t scribble notes, or open his mouth to respond, but only stared straight ahead.

“Are you a Christian, Gary?” Azrael asked.

“I’m Jewish.”

“Still, you know Psalm 23-”

“‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ Of course.”

“And what’s a shepherd? A husbandman, right?”

Azrael went on. “He tends his sheep, he leads them to good pastures and clean water. He guards them through the valley of the shadow of death.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why does he guard them?”

“So the wolves won’t kill them?”

“Yes, so the wolves won’t kill them. Does that mean they never die? Does he keep them into ripe old age so that they can pass away in their sleep?”

“It’s a metaphor. You can’t stretch it too far.”

“He keeps the wolves from killing them at the wrong time so he can kill them at the right time. Part of husbandry is slaughter. He chooses when the sheep will live, when they will be sheared, when they will mate, and when they will die. Could any shepherd be a good shepherd if he didn’t cull his herd, didn’t keep them from overgrazing the land and starving themselves out?

And he kills them in their prime, when they’ll provide the best meat.”

“The good shepherd is a Christian metaphor.”

“The psalms are Jewish. Why is it so hard for you to believe that God chooses the time and place and means of human death? Would you rather that he not choose?

That he not know, not plan? That he leave you to the wolves and the shadow of death and so either be incapable or unwilling to save you?”

“Look, we’ve strayed from the point.”

“No, this is the point. To understand me, you need to understand that the actions of the divine are incomprehensible and unconscionable to the mortal. That which God not only may do but must do – orchestrate the deaths of all humans – is inexcusable when done by a human. So, too, that which a human shepherd not only may do but must do – slaughter the creatures in his charge – would be inconceivable to the sheep. You fear and denounce only because you don’t want to recognize that humans aren’t the top of the food chain.”

Doctor Gross stared, perplexed, speechless.

“Let’s get to the regression,” Donna said, impatient.

“I’m tired of all this talk of death. I’m tired of Keith McFarland and Derek Billings and the Angel of Death. I want to hear more about William Dance. I want to see that boy standing next to his bike in front of the yellow house.”

“Yes,” agreed Doctor Gross, shaking his head to clear it. “Yes. William, you remember your place of bliss?

That’s where we’re headed. I want you to relax. Lean back in the bed.”

“What other choice do I have?”

“Yes. Well, get as comfortable as possible. Take three deep breaths: one… two… three… Good. Take another breath…”

What it was that smoked at the end of the stick was not advertised. If you asked, they called it meat. It had small bones – leg bones and otherwise – and was cheap. Everybody ate them so they couldn’t have been too bad.

He ate. It wasn’t too bad. He had paid a thousand pesos and gotten change. He sat there on his heels. The old men across the dusty road laughed in their circle. They were smoking cigars as black as dog turds. They hadn’t gotten all the feathers off the head, which was hidden beneath a place where the plumes were charred together. Hungry, he pulled the burned parts off and chewed gently around the crow’s eye. Darkness. That was what they gave to him after killing Billings. Darkness. Reason enough for the sane prisoner to go insane. A cell with no windows, no light, only a steel bed and a stainless steel toilet without a seat and a slot through which came anything that came for him. Solitary. It was the greatest punishment a prisoner could receive.

Short of death.

Azra sat in the darkness. They had even put a rubber flange on the outside base of the door to prevent light from seeping through. He had saved a crust of bread from one meal and let it harden on the floor overnight so that he could wedge it beneath the door, lifting the flange and letting a little light in. Now, in the glow that came around the crust of bread, he could see his dim little space, cement and steel and nothing else. His breath condensed on the walls, steel dappled in cold sweat.

With each passing moment, his humanity sank deeper into him, from bone and blood to spirit and soul. He was trapped in this body, in this tiny room, in this darkness. He was at the mercy of his skin he inhabited and its limits.

He had sat beside the door and thought about gnashing his own wrist open and bleeding out through the crack. That would be a kind of ritual escape, extending part of his vitality out the door. But ritual was no longer important. He needed real escape.

What of semen? If it ventured beyond and found an egg, a part of him would have escaped this trap. No wonder those on death row were in so great a hurry to marry, to gain conjugal visitation rights. In that sudden thought, the whole fetid weight of reproduction and sexual desire and mortal fear poured through him.

“Do you think it is natural to have these feelings? Do you think God wants humans to have these feelings when they kill?”

Fuck, yeah, was all he could think. Fuck, yeah. It was not the sort of response worthy of an angel, but neither was his soul any longer worthy of an angel.

An angel. That’s what he needed. If he were truly human now, there would be an angel assigned him, a guardian. Not all humans who heard voices were schizophrenic. Some were prophets and shamans and artists. All humans would hear the divine voices if only they quieted the raging of their hearts and minds and listened with their souls. What better, quieter place?

He pulled his knees up toward his chest, drew a deep breath, and let the air sluice from his nostrils. His ribs slouched inward like the tines of a folding umbrella. He emptied himself of the panic and pain of the last weeks, the mental torments of a mind once infinite that found itself not just finite but imprisoned, coerced, controlled. He drew another breath and let it go, imagining those heavy pollutants drifting out of him. A third breath, but the air was stale. It was all pollutants.

He closed his eyes. Even the bread-light of the door was gone now. His mind seemed a shadowy blue thing hovering before him. Its convoluted surface peeled slowly back like the cracked outside of a road apple. The pocketed wetness within sprayed upward and outward – outward no farther than the cell walls, but upward, upward, propelling the ceiling higher, the ceiling and the cells above it higher until the whole column of building broke free and rocketed into the sky. It, too, was black in an imagined nighttime, and the building cross-section dropped away behind the thrust of that bursting mind.

There, at last – no limits – the flesh torn asunder like some Gnostic nightmare, the spirit flung outward into infinity to find its eternal angel guide. Here in the endless centuries, a guide: some Gabriel, some Uriel, or if not a friend, an adversary, an accuser, a Satan. At least with such there would be a divine measure upon which to form up the coiling putrescence of humanity.

He waited, blown wide open, consciousness as raw as a wound. He waited. The inspiration and suspiration of the old metallic air no longer mattered. The fleshy ache of skin and muscle and fat pressed between steel and bone was gone. There was only the vulnerability of his seeking, hoping soul.

Beauty. God always dwelt in beauty. Azra let his seeking spirit draw beauty unto it. In beauty he would find his guardian, his adversary, his angel who would aid and guide him. In beauty.

He waited.

Should he sing a song? Should he drone one of those endless hymns of clapboard Protestantism? Or some Kyrie? Some psalm? They seemed to help humans focus their souls upward, outward.

Oh, for a thousand tongues…

His voice was as primal and imperfect as the rest of him, more a groan than a song. Did nothing come easily to mortal flesh?

Oh, for a thousand tongues, to sing My great Redeemer’s praise,

The glories of my God and King,

The triumphs of His grace!

The sound only brought him back to the ringing coldness of the cell and the pulpy pointlessness of his body. He let it echo away into silence and held wide his wounded soul and waited.

Silence.

Not silence, but the phlegmy sawing of lungs and the dull thud of a heart that cannot be willed to cease and the ragged thoughts of a racing mind condemned to sense and sense and sense. The body was loud. Bladders emptied and filled. Valves fluttered open and closed. Glands oozed in silent ignominy. The human body was no more than a loud coalition of mollusks, pulsing and squirting in constant concert. To never have silence. To not for a moment be able to hear past one’s own thundering presence to heed a voice beyond…

Where is my angel?

Beauty. God will be in beauty.

Into that welling emptiness came a presence – face, body, mind, spirit, all. She was beautiful in no standard sense, but somehow the lines of her being, the eyes, the dogged optimism, the courage… somehow they transformed the finite to make it infinite. They made that one woman a whole continent, a whole world. That woman. No angel, she, but a police officer. A Catholic. Donna.

What is it she always says? Mother of God? She could well be. She could well be.

Suddenly he was not alone. He felt her presence, her straightforward and all-seeing presence there with him in the dark. She knew about him. She had hunted him down. She lived because he could not bear to let her die. Now he lived because she could not bear to let him die.

Yes, here was his angel.

Tears were coming. His shoulders curled inward with a soft shuddering. He was not alone.

That thought brought another creature into being, another presence. It rose between his legs, the immemorial snake of desire. He had known of masturbation, of course, for he knew all the mind of God. He had known of it, that it was done by nearly everyone, and that when first discovered, many believed they had invented their own perverse sin. He had known it was not sin at all, nor perverse, but part of the mind of God. Still, as he unzipped the fly of his prison uniform, he felt filthy and hopeless and damned for all eternity. The semen came quickly, fluorescent in the darkness. So powerful were the constrictions of testicles and prostate that he did not even notice the key in the door, or the door swinging wide until the unforgiving glare of the jail’s yellow lights washed across him.

“Put your pecker away and get up, Angel,” came the voice of a radiant young man who stood by the beaming hole. “Your lawyer wants to see you.”

She stood at her end of the conference room table when they brought him in. After the long darkness and the pervading pink of the walls, Counselor Lynda Barnett was dazzling in her skirt-suit. A riot of green leaves moved in the shimmering shoulders and sleeves of the jacket. Her red silk blouse looked too delicate and beautiful to exist in the same world as the heat-annealed caverns of the prison.

“Hello, Lynda. Good to see you.”

“Hello, William?”

“Whatever you want to call me,” he replied as he sat, the guards locking his cuffs into the tabletop. “I’m just glad to hear someone speak to me in a civil tone.”

She nodded tightly and sat. “You may not be so happy to hear what I have to say.”

His eyes ceased their smiling, and his attention flicked down toward the much-scarred tabletop. “Which is?”

She pulled papers from her attache. “You have pleaded not guilty. You refuse to let me use an insanity defense. You refuse to let me refer to the past that has been discovered for you. In two weeks you’ll appear, defenseless, before a judge and jury.”

Defenseless. Suddenly, that fate sounded terrifying. Donna’s voice came echoing through his mind. You’re human now. You have to live. In the dark dankness of isolation, he had felt the beginnings of what mortals call misery. Truth dissolved away. Divinity was only a disappearing dream. Humanity remained. “I want to cooperate. What must I do?”

“Good,” she said through an angry smile. “We’ve got a lot to do in the next two weeks. Let’s hope you can be as slick with the media, the judge, and the jury as you were with Derek Billings.”