THE ANGEL OF DEATH
by
Michael Shea
A young man named Engelmann, out late one night, entered a phone booth and pretended to search for a number in the book. He savoured the booth’s little island of light, and his own prominence in it, like a lone glass-cased museum exhibit on the dim street.
Displaying himself thus made him grin with irony, for he knew his rarity and power would not be perceived by anyone who passed. Here, O Street, was the man the city lived in fear of! His very shape and substance! Behold, and fail to see! He lifted the receiver, deposited two dimes, dialled a local prefix and then, randomly, four more digits.
He got an old man’s voice. “Who is it?” A little angry-edgy, as if to an unexpected knocker outside his door. There was a TV on in the background.
“Hello, sir,” Engelmann cried, hearty as an emcee. “I’m glad you tuned in, sir, because, once again, it’s Angel of Death time!”
A pause. Just enough to show the name had struck, registered. “What? Is this some radio call? I never listen to the radio.”
“No, sir! This is a hot tip. I’m letting you and only you know that it’s Angel of Death time, brought to you by that ol’ Guy in the Sky, the Angel of Death himself, myself!”
Now the pause echoed unmistakably with the old man’s awareness. “Who is this? Who are you calling?”
“But I’m calling you! And I know you’re ecstatic, ’cause only I can satisfy, right? Only I can make ’em die!”
“You’re crazy! Who do you want? Leave me alone!”
Engelmann positively shimmied with contained laughter for the old man didn’t hang up! He waited, as if for the reply of Death itself. He waited to argue for mercy, for exemption, as if Engelmann hovered somewhere above his roof and clutched his very fate in angelic talons.
“Oh, but sir – you’re not my Mystery Guest tonight. I’m just calling to tell you. You must know about me – how I go light-foot, smoother than smoke, or growl along in my powerful car. I’m that devilish, cleverish, feverish Angel of Death, that snooper and swooper and brain-outscooper. This is a tip, sir! I picked you out of the air! Take this down.”
The old voice came back, half-begging, half-barking: “You shouldn’t be bothering people that don’t do you any harm! Is this a joke?”
“Just take this down please, sir. Don’t you see it’s a newsworthy tip? You can send it to that Jimmy what’s-his-name. Is it Scheisskiss? The guy who writes the column. Ready now? Take this down:
‘Those sniggering bitches
Out scratching their itches –
All steamy and sticky,
All teases and twitches –
I shatter their skulls into
Spatters and tatters –
I slug and I slug them
To jumbled red matter!’
Engelmann hung up crisply and left the booth. He strolled back the way he had come. His body was plump and tall, and he moved with a kind of stately drift – a secret pomp. He was a visiting potentate, again at large in the Cosmos. Tonight, in fact, he was stepping down from his Citadel and into the city’s Time and Space, for the eighth time.
During his intervals up in his eyrie (where he lay in timeless power, watching TV) he was also down here among men, of course. Their unflagging vigilance and dread enshrined him everywhere, night after night. He was a Presence here even between those times when he chose, according to the long sweet tidal shiftings of his will, to descend in the flesh.
And now, for the eighth time, he had descended, and moved among men. Even unto his angelic car he moved, and entered it, and woke the vigour of its engines.
At this point a remarkable coincidence – the first, in fact, of a series – occurred. At the very hour of the Angel’s descent into the space and time of mankind, another transcendent individual made a similar entry. That is to say, he plunged from space into the warm, rich atmosphere of Earth.
It wasn’t only the timing that made this remarkable. For as the newly arrived entity braked his plunge and extruded an umbrella of rigid cilia so that his sphericity, hanging beneath, began to drift smoothly like a giant thistledown – as he performed these adjustments, he immediately initiated a sensor-probe of relative psychic concentrations throughout the biosphere. And in doing this he quickly identified as his nearest promising target a huge concatenation of vitalities that was none other than the city through which Engelmann then moved.
Engelmann was driving at that moment, gliding down the lamplit corridors of parked cars. Humorously, he had chosen a street that was just on the margin of what the press generally designated as his ‘territory.’ As he drifted past, his eyes ransacked the cars, front seats and back. Eerie emptiness! Nine months before, a street like this would have offered a dozen pairs of greedy mammals, hutching up, for here was the only escape for the ache of young blood in the crowded apartments everywhere. And it had been he, Engelmann, who, like a scouring wind, had cleansed these streets.
But there was something here. He sensed it. He almost felt the secret rocking, the muffled titter aimed precisely at himself, a snigger of triumph at duping the Angel of Death. He turned and came back down the block. There was a van ahead that, just perceptibly, had moved, or had it? As he passed, his senses crowded up to it, embraced it, passionate for any faint clue of hot, hidden grapplings. And, by his fierce angelic eyes, it moved! The van rocked slightly!
He parked around the nearest corner. His hand, stark and gorgeously remorseless like an eagle’s talon, grasped his weapon and plunged it deep in his jacket’s side-pocket. Ah, the luscious tang of imminence in the night air! They in their grunting swinish scorn of him, thinking themselves safe. To know he could creep near them, pluck off their nasty shell of secrecy, smash to putty their sneering softnesses till they bled and dribbled, swooning and collapsing in exquisite agonies of remorse and futile repentance!
He stepped out, feeling the swell and tug of mighty wings at his shoulders, and wing-buoyed he moved, his heels treading in creamy silence the would-be-betraying pavements.
He stood at the van’s cab door. There were curtains behind the front seat, and even as he stared at them, they shivered. He shuddered, their undulation smoothly continued in his flesh; and looking down with casual sovereignty, he saw that the lock button stood tall and silver within the rolled-up window, obedient to his will.
Then he moved, knowing his own speed and clarity compared to the dazed flesh-tranced time he was thrusting into: he, a celestial falcon; they, groggy and a-blush with blood, like vermin too gorged even to flinch. He seized the handle, thumbed home the button, pulled wide the door, and vaulted up to jam his knees into the driver’s seat. He swept aside the curtain, and two matted heads popped up from the broken pane of streetlight that fell and shattered on two bodies. The Angel of Death squeezed out a bullet from his Magnum and felt the delicious lurch of its velocity jump from him and plunge through the skin and domed bone of the smaller head. With splendid fluid flexions of sinew and talon, with leisurely largess, he hammered both those skulls repeatedly, distributing the roaring gouts of lead to follow his dying targets through their spasms of recoil.
Engelmann drove home wonderingly, whimsically. He went into an all-night market for a six-pack of root beer, doubled back to buy a newspaper at a liquor store, went to a drive-through taco stand, and after elaborate polite discussion with the woman behind the clown-faced intercom, ordered a vanilla shake. These movements were his way of relishing his almost dizzying freedom – freedom to prowl these streets, or to quit them, to pull up and, in one smooth climb, to exit them, whenever he chose.
Meanwhile, that intercosmic tuft of thistledown was drifting over the very neighbourhood that Engelmann had just visited with his wrath. This being had, among his colleagues, a complex personal designation that involved simultaneous articulations in a multiple of electromagnetic frequencies. The phonetic aspect of this designation was, roughly, ‘Siraf’.
Siraf, then, just as Engelmann was ordering his vanilla shake, selected the rooftop of a tall and partly disused building as a covert in which to pass his inert phase. The Archives required that all field-workers, upon entering an alien sphere, lie passive for a time, before engaging in research on the indigenous life-forms. By this tactic the worker could gain some assurance that he had entered a sufficiently stable configuration, before expending valuable research energies on mimicry and transactional involvement. Each worker could carry only limited quanta of metamorphic power, and even in the best circumstances, only brief investigations were possible. Hence the care taken to telepalp the surroundings thoroughly for any sign of disruptive local phenomena that might abort the workers’ researches.
Siraf adopted a spherical shape and rolled himself against the tarry brick parapet of the rooftop. He immediately initiated telescans of the nearest-lying indigenes. Although most of these seemed to be dormant, and all were in any case too distant for fine-focused observations, the young scholar was able to add much to the morphological program provided him by the Archives for this race. That program had been in truth the merest sketch, and Siraf improved the hours of inertia by fleshing it out with studious encodements of the data he was able to gather.
But of course, this kind of preparation could only go so far in alleviating the inevitable obscurity and confusion of alien interactions. He could expect to assimilate most of the physical structure, locomotor routines, much vocabulary, and so be able, on emerging from dormancy, to mimic and to initiate transactions with the autochthones. But it would only be during that brief and energy-exorbitant period of mimicry and close-range interaction that he could fine-tune his observations.
For example, Siraf had soon enzymatically recorded much of the local speech. But when it came time actually to effect relationships with the natives, he would still have no clue to the motile and behavioural patterns that this vocabulary served. He would know how to express many concepts, but would have no guide to what concepts it was appropriate to express under what circumstances. A field-worker could come onstage in perfect costume, so to speak, but with no hint of his role, or even, in many cases, of what kind of thing a role might be.
It should give some sense of Siraf’s excellence as a scholar to report that within a few busy hours of assimilations and inferences, he had arrived at a closely reasoned choice of form. Of the two sexes, it appeared that the larger, the ‘male’ enjoyed a significantly greater degree of mobility and social initiative than did the ‘female’. (For example, the dreams of several nearby dormant females were full of this very theme.) To this finding he added the fact that the sexual drive of this race seemed remarkably dominant among its impulses – a circumstance that boded well for his chances of getting much-valued insights into its reproductive rituals. Altogether, a young male with high mating potential seemed indicated for a maximum probability of successful interaction. The specifications he arrived at were, in the native units: height, 6’4”; weight, 215 lbs; age, 24 years; muscular and vascular systems highly articulated; features, Nordic; hair, blond.
Siraf was aware that many of his colleagues would condemn this choice by reason of its exceeding the norms of size, strength, and general aesthetic appeal by local standards. They would point out that an abnormal individual was not likely to elicit normative reactions. His atypicality would distort his findings.
But Siraf’s heuristic methods were the reverse of conservative. He reasoned that there was no such thing as ‘situational purity’. To experiment at all was to disrupt, distort. And since there was no way around it, why not use slight disruption? Let the field-worker agitate a bit the hive he visits. Not traumatically, but to a degree that might intensify and multiply the scholar’s involvements in his all-too-brief time for probing.
Throughout those hours when Siraf lay conceiving himself, it happened that Engelmann was doing very much the same thing. He was in his room on the top floor of an old apartment building. He lay on his mattress before the TV, propped to a half-sitting posture by pillows. He was alternately watching the tube and writing in a spiral notebook that he held against his raised knees.
‘Freedom!’ (he wrote) ‘It’s a joke/miracle, a staggering simplicity! You just dare to take Justice, and the daring alone fills you with power. The mere daring-to-fly is the power of flight. I can fly. I have power over life, and freedom from death. Even if the Insect-Squads eventually do take me –’
A Jacuzzi ad came on and he stopped writing to watch it, having seen it twice already. It would repeat throughout the program, a late movie on a local channel. Two big-breasted girls in bikinis – one on the edge of the pool paddling her legs, one sitting in the water – laughed with a young man. He was neck-deep, and his trendy moustachioed head bobbed on the bubbles just at the submerged girl’s breast level. There was a voice-over pitch, and addresses of the company’s outlets rolled across the scene. When the ad was over, Engelmann had to reread what he had written before he could go on:
‘I won’t be taken to the Poison Room. Oh no! I’ll go to the shining halls of Medicine. I’ll be given soul-upholstering drugs. For my freedom itself protects me. It’s too “unreal” for the Little Folk. The very horror of what I do classifies it past the reach of punishment.’
He stopped to watch the movie for a while. It was sci-fi, and there were spaceflight shots with starry backgrounds that exalted him. The ad returned. He watched it closely, and afterward he wrote with a heat and fitfulness he had not shown:
‘I do what I will. I paint the world as I will. Your skulls are my paintpots, bitches! I empty them with my rude and potent brush. I splash out frescoes of my revenge. Your cheating sneering little world is my palette. I’ll make my masterpieces and lay them out to dry. And I’ll have them displayed in the press as if it were no more than paint I splash around. And so it is! And so it is! I make it so, and so it is!’
Engelmann laid aside his notebook. He found that he ached to go down again, to swoop for another kill. That lovely blind red impetus had returned to him, his heart was engorged with it as with some bodily fluid.
It caused him a painful division of feeling. He had always loved to savour each deed both ways in time, first through a long anticipation, and after, to relish its echo through the expectant desolation of the city’s renewed terror. Especially in this latter period he felt his tread to reverberate, gigantically, through the city. Then, spectral, huge, he lived in the hearts of seven million.
But desire was great upon him, and he lusted for a fierce, unparalleled abundance that would fill the air with the red debris of his redundant rage. After brief hesitation, he made the pact with himself to take further vengeance the following night.
Engelmann did not fall asleep until the afternoon of the next day, and he was still in the depths of his sleep when, at dusk, Siraf terminated his dormancy.
He rolled out from the brick parapet to a clear space on the tar and gravel. There, again in compliance with Archivist tradition, Siraf uttered the Field-worker’s Vow prior to transmorphing. The articulation involved a phonetic aspect that sounded like lush, melancholy flute solos. Its cognitive content was, roughly:
‘Having sworn to be a foundling through the stars
I lie on yet another threshold.
I will remember, though I travel far.
As treasure I’ll store up all I behold.’
He extended his mass into a slender ellipsoid six and a half feet long, and transmorphed.
He had perceived that the fibre-envelopes universally adopted by the indigenes were pretty widely available and thus did not warrant the energy expenditure that would be needed to fabricate them from his own substance. He found, as he lay making detailed adjustments of his new material apparatus, that the pebbles of the rooftop painfully disrupted the curvature of his dorsal dermal surface. He sat up and brushed the little stones off the pale ridgings of back and shoulder muscle. His length of limb stretched his sinewing to gothic gauntness. He stood up and did a brisk dance of acquaintanceship with arms, legs, lungs. Then he walked to the parapet, leaned on it, and looked consideringly over the city.
Profitable as his dormant scanning had been, he now faced a demanding struggle for comprehension. The race was a complex one; close-range involvement with it was going to be a matter of frantic ad-libbing, a swift juggling of known variables with the always bewildering influx of new data. A local parallel for his plight would be a man running dizzily ahead to keep a crazy stack of dishes balanced in his hands. Siraf smiled, practicing the facial contortion that would be deemed appropriate to this image.
His first goal must be clothing. He had foreseen that if his stature was unusual, so would commensurate enfibrements be, but he was counting on the abundance of the population to ensure that an appropriate envelope could be found fairly readily. He scouted now for the nearest considerable centre of vital activity.
Siraf happened to be in a largely residential neighbourhood, but it was a Saturday night, and three streets away was a very thriving stretch of bars, discos, dirty-book stores, and rib joints. It was invisible to him, even from his thirty-story elevation, but he telepalped the psychic concentration, noting that high emotive levels seemed to prevail. The area should offer a rich field of options, at least. He picked out an alleyway route that would bring him to the middle of the block. Then he found the shadowiest side of the building and walked down the wall, risking this anomalous gravity-orientation because dark had fallen and it saved time.
The last alley Siraf followed debouched on the activity zone. He crouched behind some big packing crates just inside the alley mouth. Across the street he could see an adult bookstore and an Italian take-out stand. Within five seconds of his pausing in this covert, an individual pulled up to the curb in front of the bookstore, and he was not only amply clothed, but just about Siraf’s size as well!
Surely this was one of those rare assignments where the field-worker and his target cosmos were in a strange harmony, and luck blessed the scholar’s labours. This convenient individual was of a darkly pigmented species that Siraf had rejected as a mimicry choice when he perceived that it enjoyed more limited options of social interaction than the paler ones. The man wore a broad-brimmed leather hat, a pirate shirt of maroon silk, leather pants, and calf-high Peter Pan boots. He also wore a gold watch and a gold pendant and several fat gold rings. The Eldorado he sat in, all burnished chrome, glowed on the pavements. He waited behind the wheel, and after a few moments two brightly and scantily-dressed young women sauntered up to speak to him through his half-open window.
The psychic effluvia that flooded these neon-starred blocks were those of highly stimulated organisms. In all directions he detected the perceptual blur and latent vulcanism of alcohol-saturated brains. Even a highly disruptive act, if swift and decisive, should be slow to engender any organised response in such surroundings. Siraf deemed some initial traumatising of the natives permissible, if it was strictly localised in its impact, and if it facilitated entry into full interaction with them elsewhere. He began to increase the density of his hands and arms.
It took several moments to achieve a massiveness sufficient to deal with the glass and steel of the Cadillac. The girls strolled off again. The statuesque black man in the colourful enfibrements sat adjusting his tape deck. Siraf gauged him to be perhaps an inch taller and twenty pounds heavier than himself. He realised that when the man’s enfibrements had been removed, he would experience the atmospheric temperature as a great discomfort. The large boxes behind which the scholar crouched were full of shredded wood, and he decided they should answer nicely for insulation. His arms were ready. He straightened up and strode toward the Eldorado.
There was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, but all at some distance. The nearest were the two girls. Both gave amazed shouts, and one of them made a merry, obscene gesture of admiration. The well-dressed man became aware of Siraf a fraction later than his two employees. He was, however, like most successful pimps a quick-thinking man. He took in the nude stranger’s sheetings of stomach muscle, the machinelike power of his thighs, his dreamy and absorbed gait – and he locked both doors and twisted the key in the ignition.
Siraf, telepalping the mechanism, inhibited the spark. He plunged his hands through the window glass, took a crushing grip on the steel of the door, and ripped it entirely out of its snug frame. He placed it as neatly as possible on the roof of the car. Then he reached inside for the man, who was just then crawling through the further door, and seized him by shoulder and thigh. He spoke several reassurances that he had prepared in advance:
“Come along now,” he said soothingly. “Nothing to worry about. This won’t take a minute, and you’ll be plenty warm afterward.”
The man gave him a long, horrified glance. Siraf found pressure points in shoulder and leg that cancelled resistance and allowed him to lift the man out. “Outsy-daisy,” he said, uncertain of the expression. He hoisted the man straight-arm over his head and carried him to the sidewalk. There he sat him down, leaned him against the wall, and started to remove his clothes. A fascinated crowd was forming, at a respectful distance. Siraf took and donned the hat, the shirt, the trousers, and, last, the boots. He left the jewellery on the man.
When he was dressed – and it was done in moments – he picked up the still-quiescent donor and carried him to the alley mouth. There Siraf bedded him snugly amidst the shredded wood in the largest packing crate. He tucked the insulator around him till only the head lay visible, like a set jewel, or shipped fruit, in the midst of the excelsior. Since he had already grossly violated behavioural norms, he took his leave of the crowd, after an amicable salute, by running straight up the wall of the nearest building and disappearing over the top, eighteen stories above.
He knew that the indigenes’ communication system was relatively swift and efficient, and so he travelled several miles, overleaping streets, when he had to, at the darkest points and most carefully chosen instants. He did not think a concerted pursuit likely in a place not only populous but rife, so far as he could gather, with transactions of the most intense and violent kind. He fled on nevertheless, conscientiously safeguarding his researches, and it so happened that as he fled across one particular roof, his passage sent down an eerie drumbeat into the sleep of that other alien, Engelmann, the Angel of Death.
Just then he lay in the dense webbing of a lustful nightmare where ghastly sprawling spiders envenomed and sucked away his flesh. The hammering of those feet kicked through and scattered the nightmare like gusts tearing up a sluggish ground mist and sent sad, turbulent dream-reverberations through him. He felt that desperately vital news, cosmic tidings, were being sped by messenger to a distant city, where there would be a vast rejoicing. And meanwhile he, Engelmann, lay in a living grave upon some giant plain, and saw the runner pass him with that news, and struggled to rise and follow, and could not, could never reach that far, vast rejoicing.
As for Siraf, about a mile beyond this new coincidence he slowed and found a high building for reconnoitring. He decided that his entry point would be a park some blocks distant, and when he had approached it and studied it from a new rooftop perch just across the street, he felt fully confirmed in his decision. Singles bars, cabarets, movies fringed the leafy square, whose pathways and benches were as lively as the surrounding sidewalks.
Long unmoving, he spied that scene. With his fine-spun net of telepulses, he trawled and seined the swarming lagoon of psychic life below. His investigative powers were cruelly limited by distance, but such was the emotive unanimity of the crowd that he could read much from its sheer ambience. It was overwhelmingly obvious from what he saw – pairing rituals, symbolic self-exhibitions, musical mimicry of copulatory contortions – that the place was a hotbed of mating-related activities. It seemed the luck that had clothed him was not faltering.
In the Archives, mating transactions were highly prized as data, for among sexed organisms, they often provided a key to many other emotive patterns and social rituals in a given race’s repertory. At the same time, they were recognised as the trickiest exchanges for a field-worker to mimic, since cuing behaviour and display symbolism were likely to be very subtly elaborated in such crucial interactions. But Siraf resolved that his daring would match his luck. He would take mating for his immediate aim. He adjusted his hat and took the stairs down to the street.
He followed the sidewalk for a short time before crossing over to the park. With every step he modulated more precisely his posture and gait to those prevailing and achieved a fuller acquaintance with the local vocalisation system by rummaging in the vocabularies of those he passed. He accomplished, in a few hundred yards, great refinements in the facial and bodily techniques of confronting and moving among others. He also satisfied himself that most of the active pairing was going on in the park, and, accordingly, he soon crossed over.
It happened that a tall, exhilarated grad student named Jeannie Kudajzinsky had entered the park not long before Siraf did. Prior to doing so, she had enjoyed three stiff Bloody Marys at The Elevator Disco-Bar while watching the dancers with increasingly droll approval. She had spent the last five days, ten hours a day, in the library stacks preparing for her doctoral exams in anthropology. And now she lounged in the park, watching the passers-by with a jaunty smile, indulging in what she thought of as ‘contemporary anthropology’, an amused survey of current styles in self-decoration and self-preservation. Her overall feeling was that the night was splendid and anything might happen.
It was from Jeannie that Siraf received his first unmistakable lead in the tangle of fleeting ideations he was combing through as he strolled the paths. He noted among her cerebral events his own image undressed and subjected to various erotic attentions. He circled round to pass her again in a few moments.
She wore body-emphasising courting finery. Her mammary and gluteal bulges appeared precisely to fulfil the normative ideal, but her stature was sufficiently norm-excessive to make it likely that she was deprived of interaction and thus probably the more motivated toward it. She would stand about six feet tall. Fighting that inevitable pang, that forlorn sense of ignorance every investigator felt as he prepared to grapple closely with alien phenomena, Siraf stepped up to her bench and opened with an expression that he felt fairly sure was appropriate:
“Hello, my dear. You’re looking lovely tonight.”
Jeannie laughed. Her first disbelief at the approach of this beautiful Nordic pimp became a giddy sense of savoir-faire, and she promptly countered him:
“You say that like you know how I look other times. You’ve been following me around, right?”
“Oh, no. I only just now picked you out. Does your appearance change radically with the passage of time?”
“That’s putting it mildly. Think how I’ll look in forty years!”
Siraf was about to clarify that he meant over short periods, but Jeannie laughed with such gusto at her own retort that he was cued to discount the whole exchange. The image of himself sitting by her on the bench was recurring vividly in her cerebrations, attended by strong though ambiguous affect. Siraf sat down with a reassuring smile. He was aware of a verbal routine, apparently designed for such a situation as this, and so he ventured it: “I was just passing, and I thought I’d stop by for a while and see how you are.”
The woman’s new laughter informed him that the formula did not apply.
“Well, that’s wonderful,” she gasped. “We don’t get to see you much out this way.” Jeannie was going to elaborate the joke when she was taken with a guilty awareness that, in her excitement and anxiety, she had done nothing but laugh at the man. “Listen,” she said, “are you a foreigner? Your accent is perfect, I mean you have no accent at all, but your … your idioms are a little funny – Christ! That doesn’t sound like I’m putting you down, does it?”
“I’m not the slightest bit put down. In fact, I am a foreigner. I’m Norwegian.” Jeannie’s turn of speech had given him his cue, and as he spoke he read the nationality in her expectations.
“You certainly look it,” she said. “I mean that as a compliment.”
“Oh, yes,” said Siraf, adopting a grave manner and feeling with new keenness his ignorance. He decided it was safest to answer tautologically and counter-compliment: “A compliment is a very pleasant thing to receive. Thank you. You are a very desirable woman. I mean that as a compliment in return.”
Jeannie could find no sign in his face that he was joking, and as she smiled incredulously at him, he went on, developing the seemingly gratifying theme of her physical form:
“For instance, something the observer immediately notices about you is the abundant development of your breasts and your posteriors. Your face has a delightful symmetry. It is … foxlike.” He caught a clear suggestion from her here, as he hesitated. “Moreover, I see that you are unusually large, and I thought this a wonderful coincidence, because I too am abnormally large-bodied.”
From resurgent hilarity, Jeannie had subsided to bemused attention. All shadings of irony or affront were missing from the man’s impossible words. There was an honest, a tender objectivity in them such as she had never heard in a man’s voice. An Innocent? A Noble Savage? If this was illusion, as the whole man seemed illusory in his perfection, she decided to rise to it, as on a dare, and take it at face value. Had she only been pretending to believe that anything might happen tonight?
“You are very sweet to tell me the things you do,” she answered. “You have this marvellous sincerity. I hate that word, but it’s what you have. Furthermore, you’re beautiful, physically I mean, as far as I’m concerned. What do you say to that?”
She smiled in his eyes, half humour, half suspense. She did not know what to expect, as if she were Baucis in the myth and had just given a nudge of collusion to one of the disguised gods in her house. Siraf, finding no cue, returned her own formula:
“You are very sweet to tell me.”
“Most men wouldn’t react that way,” she said.
Siraf had a swift fear that the woman was objectively rating the credibility of his performance – knew him to be a performer, in other words, though he found no such image in her. “They would not?” he asked, trying to express innocent, grave alarm. It made Jeannie laugh again in spite of herself.
“Don’t be so shocked! It’s beautiful that you answered that way. See? Again beautiful. See how you’re racking up points?”
The game metaphor, which he had noted as a common turn of mind, locally, oriented him, and he recognised that performance here was humorously commented on without signifying doubt of the performer’s genuineness. He laughed, and Jeannie felt a burst of déjà vu. Long ago, in high school, before she had become (as she liked to phrase it) ‘a certified giantess’, she had often sat in a car with a certain basketball player. There had been in him a similar ease of acceptance, and with him she had felt an exhilarating, unthreatened freedom of thought and body. He would always start by inviting her for a burger and a Coke …
“Well,” said Siraf, “how about driving out for a burger and a Coke?”
This almost eerie echoing of her reverie at first made her stare and then made her jump up, as if to throw off bodily the last encumbrances of cynicism and disbelief. She snuffed the night air appreciatively, and said:
“Wonderful! I’d love a drive! I’d love a hamburger!”
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