Angelfire

TWENTY-EIGHT

GOLDIE

They say the ritual of burying or burning the dead gives a sense of closure. I’ve never known that to be true. Not when I sat shiva for my grandfather. Not for all the deaths since. Most especially not now.

I’m familiar with the phases you supposedly go through. Denial, anger, grief, acceptance, whatever. I don’t know what phase I’m in as we stand out in Grant Park under a clear dawn sky with dew scattering jewels across grass and lake and watch Magritte burn. The packet of twisted contracts burns with her.

God, that sounds wrong. It isn’t Magritte we burn. It’s a shell Magritte lived in for twenty-two years and then abandoned.

That’s Denial talking. Anger is the next scheduled speaker. I think I feel it coming on as I murmur kaddish, a prayer that I am now sure is more for the living than for the dead.

So, we are standing here and Enid and Venus are crying out the blues-he for Magritte, she for her lost Charlie. All the words have been said and Maggie’s embers rise on a slight breeze-bright little birds freeing themselves from gravity for the last time. And I am a black hole. I suck light in, but no light comes out.

The air is chill and tastes like snow and ash on the tongue. Already the clouds have banked to the north, hesitant, as if unable to believe Chicago is once again open for their trade.

Away to the west I can hear the Voices again, dark and insistent, clear as this day, no longer muddled by Clay’s Black Tower. But I still have the nightmare, because my Black Tower doesn’t stand at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph. My Black Tower, like the Kingdom of God, is within.

And as I stand at Magritte’s pyre with the music draining away and my friends standing close beside me and watching me with apprehension, I think perhaps her death here and now is a good thing. She will never look at me the way Cal is looking at me, the way Doc and Colleen are looking at me. She won’t have to watch me become whatever it is I am becoming.

People are wandering away from the park now. Even Enid and Venus are taking their leave-along with the inscrutable Howard, who will also return to the Preserve, and who, I’m forced to admit, grows on you like fungus.

This morning, as we laid wood on the pyre, he came to Cal and said, “Enid says once we get angelfire to the Preserve, we’ll catch up to you.” He moved in close and fixed Cal with those bulgy, marble eyes and added, “We will. Sometimes miracles happen.” He held up his hand, turning it back and forth in the sunlight, and it seemed to me it looked more human.

“Yeah,” Cal said. “Sometimes they do.” They were words of hope, but I saw little of that in his face. And he wasn’t looking at Howard when he said them; he was looking at Doc and Colleen, who seem reluctant to stray more than three feet from each other today. I recognized what I saw in his face then-loneliness.

I look up from the delicate act of constructing a facade and catch their eyes on me. Caught out, Colleen glances at her feet, Doc gazes out over Lake Michigan, and Cal looks straight up into the sky, shivers in the chill wind and says, “It looks like Chicago’s the Windy City again. It’s got to be at least twenty degrees colder than it was the day we got here. I wonder what else Primal was holding at bay. I don’t envy these people what they’re going to go through this winter.”

“How long will it go on?” Colleen asks. “Is this like a- a chain reaction? Will the world just mutate until…”

“Until it comes full circle?” Doc finishes. He continues to gaze out over the lake. “They say a fisherman’s children look to the sea. I wonder what our children will have to look to.”

Colleen sways toward him, the thick fabric of their jackets just brushing. A subtle movement. I wonder if they realize how bright are the cords that bind them together.

Cal glances at them and away. He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other and says, “We need to get the horses saddled and packed. If you’d like to stay out here for a while longer, Goldie-”

I shake my head. “No. There’s nothing out here. And you’re right: we need to get going.”

“Where?” asks Colleen. “Have you settled on a route yet?”

Cal rakes a hand through his hair. “Settled, no. But I have an idea. I want to take another look at the map. See what it tells me.”

He says more, but I don’t hear him. The sparks are turning to ashes. The breeze lifts them out over the water, where eventually they will settle and melt away. I think, for a moment, of joining them in the great, sparkling lake. Beneath the great, sparkling lake. But I still have work to do.

The lake and the dying fire and the sky blur, looking like a glittering watercolor. I turn my back on the pyre and walk away. There are Voices calling me and I must listen.