Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

THE TARRYING MESSENGER by Michael J. DeLuca

Pedals pumping, her breathing steady, Molly crests the hill, downshifts and coasts across the desert plateau.

Rhythm. Perpetuity. The whirring, watch-like mechanism of a ten-speed bike, kept from obsolescence and the verges of rust by meticulous care. The comforting, controlled bend of a pair of straight braids in hot, dry wind. The necessity of holding her mouth firmly closed to keep out the dust. The intensity of coloration imposed upon bulbous red boulders by prescription sunglasses, and the wash of white that intrudes from beyond the edge of the lens. Molly thinks of the scientist whose job it is to make vibrant and dynamic the bleak images from the surface of Mars, and how she herself, via those tinted lenses, performs the same task.

A highway sign sails past, like a fellow satellite on a different trajectory. A town rises out of the earth’s curvature: heat-shimmers, irrigation, green landscaping made fantastic by contrast with the pale colors of the desert. And on the town’s outskirts, high atop sandstone cliffs like courses of bricks laid by the hand of God, a man-made structure gleams—all stark, straight lines and perpendicularity, concrete and glass. Art in conflict with nature. A church.

Below it, a parking lot full of windblasted cars, sparkling. Tourists—of whom Molly does not count herself one, though she has never been to Sedona before and does not mean to stay. She isn’t here to leave her mark upon the landscape, or to capture part of it to take home. She’s just a traveler.

Molly angles away from the highway, tracing the smooth curve of the white line exactly, the ten-speed’s wheels holding to it like a rail. She squeezes the brakes. Her sneaker scrapes against pavement.

A water fountain. It bubbles up hot and slowly grows colder. Molly reminds herself not to drink too much. She fills her water bottles, though she has to queue up again with the tourists for each one.

She tightens the straps on her saddlebags, walks the bike to the foot of the stairway where tourists wait to ascend the face of the cliff. A small crowd collects there: Germans, Texans, Japanese, children kicking at pebbles, babies sagging in the heat.

And in their midst, an angel. Golden. Rigid. Immobile, strapped by its legs to the bed of a truck. It stands with knees bent and wings half-spread, as though just arriving, or about to depart. In one hand it carries a trumpet, in the other a scroll. A messenger.

Molly cranes her neck, muscles pleasantly sore from the posture of cycling. The steeple, stark white against the cloudless sky, surmounted by nothing. She imagines the angel up there. The end of its journey. Nobody will see it from this close again. From those distant, gilded lips, no one will hear its message.

Another week and Molly’s summer journey will end at the Pacific. A plane ride home, then back to her parents and school. The thought scares her. She has grown too accustomed to motion.

Hydraulic brakes blast. A tractor-trailer pulls in off the highway, carrying a crane. Squat Navajo workmen push the crowd back from the angel, setting up cones.

She feels faint, lightheaded. Too many miles, in too much heat. The angel swims before her eyes. She decides, in the interest of safety, to allow herself a rest.

Molly hitches a ride into town. She sits in the rear of a pickup, the soles of her sneakers pressed together, one hand gripping the crossbar of the bike. She stretches her thighs, the tips of her braids tickling her shins. The broken red cliffs and the church recede. She sips water, already tepid, and thinks about the mindset of the West—of the kind of society that could exist among such spiritual landscape, yet feel the need to interrupt its beauty with a monument to God. The people riding in the cab of the pickup, a couple with a toddler—she wonders what makes their own mindset so different from hers. On the East Coast, churches are small, unassuming. It’s the ideas they enclose that betray them.

In town, she buys lunch: avocado, sprouts and pickles on a crunchy baguette, iced green tea sweetened with agave. She retreats with her meal from the too-cold air conditioning, sits at a table on the sidewalk. Red rock mountains rise in the distance at either end of the long, main street. Rows of Tibetan prayer pennants strung between phone poles. A shop sells turquoise, woven blankets, kachina dolls; another beside it, astrological symbols, crystal pyramids, recordings of waterfalls. She visits these places, touching objects, looking the proprietor in the eye because she feels obliged to, because that’s what her trip across the country is supposed to be about. Truth versus indoctrination. The real versus the preconceived. She left the ten-speed locked outside the bank, but she carries the bike helmet with her, swinging from her wrist. It reminds her of her transience here—that none of what she does or sees need stick, or mean anything at all.

“You have a glow about you,” says the plump Latina lady in the crystal shop. “An aura of detoxification and change.”

Molly laughs nervously. “What, like I’m pregnant?” The joke comes out meaner than she meant.

The lady smiles thinly and explains about auras. How they’re particularly visible in the desert air, the same way the stars at night seem magnified. “Your body is expelling toxins on both the physical and spiritual planes. There’s a buildup of negative feeling in your chakras that has suddenly begun to break free.”

Molly brushes at her arms. Pedaling in desert heat, her pores produce not sweat but salt, a whitish haze on clothes and skin. “I’ve been riding a bike across country.”

“For how long?” asks the lady.

“Not long enough.”

“That would explain it.” The lady places a tumbled gemstone on a silver chain around Molly’s neck. “Rhodochrosite. It’s believed to foster acceptance and serenity during periods of radical change.”

The shop has mirrors everywhere. Molly hides a sour face. It’s a pink stone. Pink, with white impurities, and a startling streak of black. Makes her think of her mother. She can’t buy anything anyway. No room for trinkets in her budget, let alone room in her bags. She starts to pull it off. The lady gently grabs her wrists. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you do that. Negative energy, you understand—its release contaminates all those around you. I’m not asking you to buy the pendant. In fact, why don’t you take it? A gift. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask…. Please get out of my store and don’t come back.”

Speechless, Molly drops the pendant back around her neck.

On the way to the door, she passes a bulletin board full of ads for psychics, reiki, acupuncture. Hot springs excursions. Horseback tours of the canyons, Hopi ruins. A white flyer, pinned at the center of the board, shows a drawing of the church on the cliff. In the drawing, the angel is already in place atop the spire—just a stick-figure really, except for the wings. A halo surrounds it like a lens flare.

She pushes through the door into the heat. The pink pendant sparkles.

She imagines the church service inside that giant white monolith—windows behind the altar opening on desertscape, scraggly clusters of evergreens, red buttes. Someone in a robe, attempting to assign it a meaning different from the one she’s come to on her own.

What day is it? Time blurs, spent rolling down the highway to wind and the whirr of gears. She waits for the bank sign to come around. 107° F. 1:12 PM. Sat., Sept. 6.

A man strolls by in a sandwich board, his shadow sharp against the sidewalk. The words on the board warn of Armageddon, with an illustration of a landscape in flames. A big saguaro cactus going up like a devil’s fork. Molly hasn’t seen saguaros yet—not far enough south. Anyone who takes Revelations at face value must necessarily be immune to irony.

He catches her eye, or she catches his.

Molly breathes in, steady. Just some crazy prophet. Trying to hand out pamphlets and failing, repelling passersby as though surrounded by a magnetic field. He even looks like Jesus.

“This is it,” he’s saying, his voice projecting like a circus barker’s. “Yep, the end of the world. Want to know how I know? We’ve broken our trust with the Lord. He gives us dominion over His creatures, asks us to care for His creation, and we do? Make golf courses out of deserts. We shouldn’t be here. God made deserts as a place of trial, of holy cleansing. He made them beautiful to give us hope during punishment. Jesus came to the desert when he doubted. Moses and his people wandered here for forty years. Now we turn our deserts into resorts. The rich flock here, and the desperate follow. In Revelations, God threatens to punish us for our arrogance, to turn the skies black and the seas to poison. We beat Him to it. This Eden is artificial, a false and fragile paradise. We ourselves are raising the Sign of our end! You all have seen it: this new Temple of the Line, with its paralyzed messenger angel, borne to earth by its own weight—the weight of greed and indifference!” He lifts a sheaf of the white flyers in his fist, tears them down the center, throws them into the street. “Repent! Damn you people, repent!”

Molly is a person of conviction too. She just never managed to distill her convictions to a size that will fit on a t-shirt. This man has found a way around that. His t-shirt is almost the size of a billboard.

She falls into step beside him.

His eyes widen, crow-footed and gray through the panes of her sunglasses. The sandwich board hobbles his gait, trips him up every few strides. Molly has never engaged with a crazy prophet before. In Boston and New York, it’s easy enough to look the other way. But this is the point of her journey, isn’t it? An attempt to understand.

She forces her fingers to quit fiddling with the rhodochrosite stone. “What’s your name?” she asks.

“Daniel.”

“Do you really believe in all that, Daniel?” His face reddens. Molly realizes that she’s questioned the faith of a madman. She braces herself to be called harlot, Jezebel. Her fingers tighten on the helmet strap, ready to clock him if she has to.

His shoulders slump. “Doesn’t it sound like I believe it? Am I not convincing?”

“No…. I mean, I believe that you believe it. I even agree with you, mostly.”

“Mostly. Well, you seem to be the only one.” He sighs. Tosses the rest of his flyers in the trash. “Which part is it you disagree with?”

“The God part,” she says.

“God is the point.”

“Well, that and your methods.”

He kicks at his sandwich board. “Hmm. Very wise.” She is surprised to find this prophet capable of sarcasm.

Daniel’s voice is raw from shouting at the sinners. She gives him what’s left of her tea. They talk about belief, the natural world. Whether it’s more profound for beauty to arise out of meaningless chaos or a divine clockmaker’s plan. He shocks her by quoting the Koran.

He says he came here from the Northwest, from Portland. To preach. This is his pilgrimage, his trial.

Molly explains she came here looking for perspective. There’s something about where she grew up, who she grew up as, that she can’t help but question. Her father the preacher. Her mother. Their faith.

Daniel offers to show her his own perspective.

It feels dangerous opening up to him, even this tiny bit. She’s alone in the desert with some crazy doomsayer. With whom she happens to agree. The pendant swings.

They stop in front of the bank for Molly to collect the ten-speed. She hangs the helmet from the handlebars.

He takes her to his pulpit: a little patch of wilderness surrounding a dry creek at the north edge of town. Sage, dust, a lizard or two, until a roadrunner appears at the top of the draw. A housing development encroaches: clay roofing tiles, uniform landscaping, smooth curbs. A mile away across the desert to the east, cars pull in and out of the church parking lot, points of blinding sunlight reflected in plastic and glass.

Daniel shrugs out of the sandwich board, climbs up on an outcrop of rock. “In other parts of the world, people come to such a place to pray. They walk, some for hundreds of miles. They make offerings they can’t afford. Here people come to take pictures.”

Underneath the rocky overhang, a sleeping bag. A military-surplus olive sack. A cross wedged into a crevice.

While he preaches God’s word to the emptiness, Molly turns the bike upside-down on its handlebars. She checks the pressure in the tires, oils the dust out of the gears, readjusts the left front brake pad an eighth of an inch. She listens to him proselytizing the creatures of the wilderness. Like Saint Francis, preaching to birds on the roadsides because he knows they won’t talk back.

The clank and shudder of the crane through dry, sweltering air. The angel dangles on a wire, flashing gold as it ascends.

“Are you going to the service tomorrow?” she asks.

The crow’s feet around his eyes wrinkle like cracks in parched earth. “You think I’d abase my faith to that? They make it out to be a messenger from God. Then they imprison it in gold. They freeze that benevolent expression to its face. They petrify the Word upon the angel’s lips! To honey-coat the message of the Lord? Worse than gilding a lily. How could I worship under a symbol like that?”

Molly flips the bike upright, resettles the saddlebags astride the rear wheel. “Know thy enemy?” she says. “I’m going.”

“Then I’ll see you there. I’ll stand outside the doors of that false temple and preach! I’ll turn people away. I’ll convince them. That angel—if you could unseal its lips, and somehow get that trumpet to them, it would herald the coming of the End.”

Molly swings her leg over the crossbar. “Yeah.”

“Don’t try to tell me you don’t believe it—in a few years you won’t be able to ride a bike through this town without dying of heat stroke. A few years after that, God will turn this whole place back into a real desert. Lifeless. Like the deserts of the moon.”

That’s the trouble, Molly thinks, with wearing your convictions on your sleeve. Or on a sandwich board. Even when you’re right, it makes you look crazy. And then how can you ever convince anybody?

She doesn’t say it, though. It would come out sounding cruel.

Everything is so much easier to take in, orbiting past it on a bike at uniform speed.

Evening approaches. The angel, mounted in its high place, gives off a color like molten rock that sunglasses do nothing to mitigate. Most days, she’d be long gone by now, halfway to the next town, the gears whizzing beneath her, wheels glued to the white line.

Molly checks into a motel across from a mini-golf course. She digs a crumpled summer dress out of the bottom of the saddlebags and irons out the wrinkles. The motel-room door, half open on an evening surprisingly cool. Grasshoppers singing in the waste grass between the putting greens and the desert. The pink stone, dangling from her neck, its color muted.

She finds her cellphone in a zipper pocket. She calls her mother.

“Molly? Anything wrong?”

“How’s Dad?”

“Better, I guess. You’ve been gone a long time. But he’s still mad, if that’s what you mean.”

“Mom, I’m going to church tomorrow.”

“Really. Why?”

“I don’t know. To make you happy?”

“Well, that’s a nice thought—but Molly, your father doesn’t need you torturing yourself on his behalf. And neither do I. We’ve accepted that you’re not interested in faith. You’ve made that abundantly clear.”

“Mom, I want to go.”

“Oh you do. Why? Is it one of those old mission churches? I bet that would be a great cultural experience.”

“No, it’s….” She doesn’t know why she’s going, why she’s staying here the night instead of some campground way out in the hills. She’s stalling. Because she doesn’t want to go home. “Have a good night, Mom. Love you.”

“Okay. I love you too.”

She can’t bike to the church. The dress would rip, get caught in the gears. She can’t ask for a ride; she doesn’t want to expel any more of her toxins on this town’s spirituality than she already has. It’s only a few miles from here to the church. She can walk, if she gives herself time. It won’t mean waking up much earlier than usual.

She sets the clock alarm by the bed. When it buzzes the next morning, she dresses. Hesitates a moment over the pendant, in the end puts it on.

The sidewalks emanate faint heat. The bank sign says Sun., Sept. 7. 64° F. 4:16 AM. Her sandals swing from her fingers. Her sneakered footfalls make no sound.

The lady from the crystal shop was right about the stars. As the town shrinks behind her, the predawn sky presses close, crowding in against the cliffs. The Andromeda galaxy, spinning overhead. Betelgeuse and Capella on the horizon. The pale line of the highway. A hundred satellites sail past in an hour.

It feels funny to walk such a long way. Her steps come too easily without the pedals to resist her.

At the midpoint between night and dusk, a silhouette, small and thin, distinguishes itself from the shadow on the highway ahead of her. A person. Daniel maybe. She quickens her pace, tries to catch him.

The stars and galaxies fade. A rosy glow, white-streaked like rhodochrosite, insinuates itself upon the sky. Daniel’s silhouette sharpens, then disappears.

In the parking lot of the temple, Molly passes the pastor’s car, the empty flatbed and the crane. No sign of Daniel. She sits on the steps and switches her sneakers for the sandals.

People begin to arrive and file into the church. Baggy eyes, expectation. No Daniel to deter them. Molly expected more of him. She fiddles with the pendant, almost wants to shout at them herself.

The dark, curving outlines of the angel’s wings against the sunrise. The slowly growing sheen of gold. Giving up on Daniel, Molly takes a place at the back of the line.

Inside, four immense panes of glass impose a frame upon the desertscape in the shape of a towering cross. The bright line of the dawn progresses across the red boulders and juniper like the raising of a shade, accentuating contours, valleys, crags.

Molly finds a seat among the cramped pews. She feels tiny. Alone. Like sitting in a planetarium after the projector goes off, when the floor lights come up and the canvas behind the cosmos is revealed. The people around her make murmurs of awe over the hum of the central air. Molly shivers, rubs the goosebumps from her arms.

The pastor enters, silk vestments rustling. A pale face unnaturally young. He taps the microphone. Behind him, the glorious, red-golden vista of broken hills and sage and otherworldly buttes is as still as though it were a shoebox diorama, and Molly thinks that whatever he says, she won’t be able to forget the frame around it, the stark filter of holiness, like the knee-jerk impulse of the scientist afraid he’ll lose his funding unless he dyes the Martian desert the color everyone expects.

The sun breaks the horizon, spilling light directly into Molly’s eyes. She squints; she left her sunglasses behind.

Then he speaks, and it’s worse than she imagined. The crisis of faith—Christ in the wilderness. The sermon Molly’s father threw at her back as she fled.

Throw yourself off, the devil keeps saying. Throw yourself off the cliff.

She stands abruptly, both hands in front of her eyes to block the light. Her legs bump awkwardly against the knees of the people between her and the aisle. The crystal shop lady sits in the back row dressed in white, her face beatific. Molly covers the pendant. She hurries through the doors into the morning.

Her sneakers are right where she left them, behind a rock by the top of the stairs. And the angel is still there, at the top of its pinnacle, never to fold its wings or fly or blow its trumpet, frozen in its posture of change. Molly wriggles her toes as she steps out of her sandals. By the time she gets back to her bike it will be hot again.

Molly crouches, her back to a boulder. She ties the laces of one sneaker, switches to the other. The angel sparkles. She’s thinking of that silhouette on the road before dawn. Thinking about angels and auras and belief and air conditioning and how none of it compares to the feel of the sun.

Then a black shape appears against the white concrete of the church steeple, like an afterimage left on her eye by the sunrise. She blinks and tilts her head. The shape resolves into a man, climbing up that sheer white face towards the angel.

Daniel. She stops the word in her throat, afraid of distracting him, of making him fall.

No handholds, no purchase, at an angle steep and tapering. Yet he keeps climbing, all the way to the tiny platform at the pinnacle. He grips the angel’s ankle. He pulls himself up onto the disc at the top of the spike. He looks the angel in the eye. Defiance. A challenge.

Molly gawks. He’s decided to act instead of speak. Something’s changed him—was it her? She leaves the left sneaker untied.

Daniel grasps at the scroll and horn, tries to wrest them from the angel’s grasp. He wants to take them for himself. To be the messenger. The angel resists. The dull figure and the glittering one shift and totter, circling, trading feints and lunges like two wrestlers on a Grecian urn. Their strength is evenly matched. Likewise their determination. It only remains for one of them to make a misstep.

There’s too much glare to tell who falters first. The angel beats its wings, but the feathers are fused, the weight of the gold too immense. Daniel yells something incoherent. Triumph.

They fall. The crash of their impact echoes from the buttes.

Molly clambers over the boulders. Her loose sneaker trips her up; she loses it. Her foot slips, and red rock rips skin from her knee. It stings. She leaves a little blood behind.

Where the flawless concrete meets the rough sandstone, she finds Daniel’s body, shattered. There’s nothing left of him to cry over or comfort. Her tears are toxic, swallowed up by the parched earth.

There was life inside him. Bones, a heart. Conviction. The angel was hollow.

The scroll is just a lump of metal. It will never unroll, and if it did, what would be written there no one could read or comprehend. But the trumpet… Molly picks it up, looks through it.

The trumpet is real.

Soon, the pastor and his congregation will rush from the church. Molly will have been the only witness. What should she tell them? What will they think?

Her mind conflates her father and the frozen angel, Daniel and herself. Her bike, back in Sedona, casting its motionless shadow over the manicured grass of the mini-golf course. Her braids, dangling straight in the windless desert morning. Her heartbeat, inexorable. Blinding sunlight. Blood trickling down her knee.

Molly scrambles, slips and stumbles over the boulders and back to the doors of the church. She waits, balanced, uneven, on one sneakered and one stockinged foot.

The doors swing open, and she lifts the trumpet to her lips.