In the Garden of Eavesdropping
The adequate recluse wouldn’t know the underhanded people who sightsee the night beyond three in the morning (though an ungenerous margin of them are senseless enough, or in this case too sensitive, to have more than their fair share of knowledge concerning angels and demons, the homeless and the forlorn. Might some be all four?). Nobody would think that in this unblessed winter, anyone would be out in the streets willfully.
Behold Polk Avenue: a snow-shrouded landscape of miscellany. Characters searching for love, or employment; or for some, a malignant fun time. Though crowded with bars, diners, pawnshops, rehab clinics, yoga centers, and so forth, you’d not see them now due to the harsh winter.
“I’m out of Marlboros,” Ramiel said to Dumah. “I don’t wanna taunt the 7/11 workers anymore, they appear sped up to the point of cardiac arrest.”
“Aren’t most of them on parole?” Dumah blew out cigarette smoke. There wouldn’t be faint air from the breathless angels. Their human avatars did not oblige any actual organic assembly; a special type of chemistry was at work. Thus, the two angels, Ramiel and Dumah could chain-smoke unbrokenly with zero health risk. “What a drag.”
The two angels had made a bet on their ride down. The goal was to be the first to proselytize someone into praying before sunrise. The night was dragging. What were these two bastards going to do?
At the corner of Datlow Street and Polk Avenue slept the near-bankrupt watering hole Fried Owls. It was a shared nest for those late-nite ronins who so late in life questioned if they really do have a master, and if the barmaid, in all her busty college-dropout wisdom, was the assumed role. On the other hand, some of these sobriety rebels knew very well they were sans master until death, and prided themselves, to the point of getting kicked out of the Fried Owls. Luckless Benny was just being tossed out when Ramiel and Dumah noticed.
Though the snow had been falling for days, it was no cushion to the concrete. The moon was lit up like a strobe light, with every fleeting dark cloud came another bruised-flesh souvenir to Benny, another sign that Polk Avenue didn’t want him around. He lay, and tried not to think, tried not to breathe. A few cars would pass by, but it was just a drunken snow angel they were disregarding. What about the sober angels who were up to no good?
“How about that overachiever?” Dumah asked, an almost dead cigarette in his hand pointing towards an almost dead American.
“Same rules: get him to start praying before sunrise. I’d love to steer clear of any It’s a Wonderful Life offers. He can pray with slit wrists for all I care, so long as he does. Ok.”
Luckless Benny attempted to stand up, only, as a prisoner of gravity might, to be stricken back down to the snowy earth. He saw police sirens in the distance, the whirling blue and red juxtaposition scraping along brick apartments and cars being towed. Benny wondered, why are there only tow trucks these nights? Where did all the snowplows go? Is this a plot, to just have us all seized up indoors, never to leave? “Tow me!” Benny shouted in a derisory tone.
“Tow you where, dearest friend?” Ramiel spoke gently.
Benny’s heart palpitated. These nights, when approached on the street, it was never because someone wanted to say hello…
“Tow you where? Is there something I can do to help you, my son?”
“Why,” elegant fingers brought to the chest, a lift of the chin, Ramiel began, “I’m one of the lord’s workers, one of his messengers, if language can be an indicator. I saw your exit out of the Fried Owls. Who are you?”
“I’m…” he had to think for a moment, “I’m Ben. Most call me Benny. I never ask ‘em to, but they do anyhow.”
“Can I let you in on a secret, Benny?” The angelic atmosphere became a teensy bit airless. Snowflakes unexpectedly fell in the shape of hearts, some tasted of lager. “I’m an angel. That term, it derives from messenger, as in a messenger from up above. You know the drill, the whole hierarchy scene. It would seem everywhere one looks a caste system hovers. Anyways, I’ve got a message, O’ Beautiful Benny, and after getting kicked out of the bar while it is negative thirteen degrees out, what better time in life might you receive a message from the holiest of messengers?”
“How… how are you alive in this weather? You don’t have a jacket on! Just jeans and a shirt!”
“There is your proof! Why would an angel need to maintain a metabolism?”
Luckless Benny’s eyes dilated with the raw hope of a second chance.
“Benny, Beautiful Benny, are you aware that you can die in heaven just as you can die on earth? It is true. Once you leave this world, you enter a better world, but one not free from the grim reaper’s scythe.” The hobo’s eyes flapped like an injured bird. Ramiel’s head aimed upwards, theatrical as a fairy.
“Yes, plus, somewhere along the categorized expansion, in the grand scheme of things, a grander scheme was plotted. I hate to say this to you, but angels, we don’t have a healthy life expectancy. We’re like Great Danes! We just keel over in roughly ten years time.”
The raw hope had been tainted. Holy water met with gonorrhea. “How? How can… the afterlife be so short? What is the point then, Ramiel?” He said with immediate confusion and suspicion.
Ramiel’s head turned meticulously with the gravitas of an oncologist. The falling snow around the two had briefly ceased. A silence sharp as a steak knife invaded. “Benny… you can live longer in the next life… if you kill in this life.”
The snow continued on, dropping painfully quiet, yet painlessly soft, a scene rampant with all kinds of pain, even physical pain for Benny. He was shocked to the point of increased blood pressure. “Kill… in this life?”
“Yes, O’ Beautiful, Vagrant Benny. The more people you kill during this incarnation, the longer your life expectancy in heaven will be. It’s a strange system, in frightful need of amendment; however, this is what we have to deal with for now. You can pray it changes, though, Benny. Never underestimate the power of prayer! I mean, you may have to murder a few rival hobos in a Starbucks bathroom from time to time, I know your type showers there, but, damnit Benny! Pray the system changes! Pray it changes, tomorrow even! Pray now!”
“Never!” Benny tossed some snow from the sidewalk into Ramiel’s face. He stood up. “I want nothing to do with this system!”
Ramiel telepathically had nearby gas stations and fast food restaurants undergo a blackout to increase the urgency of his plan. Polk Avenue withheld a spotlight, descending from the moon above, between two people with too much time in their lives.
“No, Benny, you must help! It’s your duty as a living creature, God gave you life, now pray you won’t have to take any other life away!”
Benny, in a reverse of roles, had now turned his head meticulously.
“I… am ashamed of God. Though once upon a time, I, I... truly believed. But, how? How could he take my job away? Allow my wife to die from emphysema? How’d he let me get evicted and end up on the streets during the coldest winter I’ve seen in ages? To lose someone and suddenly have to pay all the expenses yourself, my word, does he know how hard that is to manage even without the grief? Now he wants me to kill others who are suffering as much as me? It wouldn’t be a mercy killing, too. I already know. Lives can be fixed, restored. Things can change. They changed from good to bad, yeah, but they just might change from bad to good again. No. I won’t ever kill. And I won’t ever pray to such a madgod. Take your messages and fuck off!”
Several feet behind Ramiel stood Dumah laughing his avatar ass off, while a hopeless romantic nearby attempted to buy roses from a late night Ugandan.
“Benny! You can’t talk to an angel like this!” Shouted a red-eyed Ramiel.
“What… what kind of angel are you?” Benny began to shiver aggressively. “No wings? Yeah? You don’t need ‘em, I bet! You probably slither up to heaven like a snake. Heaven is just full of snakes, isn’t it!?”
He walked on past the Fried Owls, vanishing among manhole steam, puckering snow, a nipping lungful of wind, et cetera. Had the gods of Polk Avenue finally devoured him wholesale? Was Luckless Benny real to begin with, or all of the homeless, the luckless, the full of pain and disbelief consolidated? It is possible even angels hallucinate…
In white jeans and white short sleeves, Ramiel and Dumah flaunted on down Polk Avenue. To the outside (or inside, hiding behind the curtain) observer, the two angels were committing a body temperature-related suicide. Or you’d consider, logically, with such svelte builds and early-autumn attire in screamingly cold climates, MDMA must be involved! Thus, no methylenedioxymethamphetamine was taken yet (you can buy it and more on Polk at any fast food drive-thru, ask if Molly is working).
Ecstasy, the word, carries an embryonic root. Does bliss only come when one is standing outside oneself?
Aren’t most euphoric feelings from even the slightest sense of disassociation?
Why have so many drugs, historically speaking, originated in, or sought out, the psychotherapist’s office?
Is the only legit cure to life’s mysterious dares a psychological escape?
Dumah, with a bleached white finger, began to write a haiku in the snow on the sidewalk:
On burgled cars, on benches~
They walked onward, until they saw the lonely Martin Septum dragging his vegan shoes, with a plastic rose in his triple-gloved hands.
Martin Septum knew true love. Knew it so well, that when he cheated on his girlfriend, he was traumatized she’d consider leaving him. It wasn’t love he gave that Fried Owls spinster, but sex, in all its monkey disparagement. The hormones drove him to a quickie-walkie up Polk Avenue to the only bar that seemed to stay open to basically every castaway. Martin’s former lover, Ack, whose marriage would have given wordplay a world record status, was neighborhoods away, and of course, Polk’s Romeo and Juliet fell in love during the harshest winter of recognized times. It was the kind of cold that’d freeze Martin’s snowballs off, unless he could find an artless vessel to release his restless manhood. What with city deflation, snowplows became midnight mythologies; stories to give kids hope that perhaps some jobs might exist when they grow up. And lest you had winter tires, or a coat made from woolly mammoth, you weren’t walking far this season…
“What’s he doing outside that apartment? Buying flowers from that Ugandan.” The immigrant’s rose container was rung with a hand written sign: ‘wanna plow her? Buy her a flower!’ it read. He stood outside by the gas stations and diners, night until morning, hoping to earn some spare change.
A swarm of lonesome women, with euthanized dreams, ended up raising the kids, be it voluntary or obligatory. As time oozed on, their cherry-picked alpha macho began to dictate how these ladies, for example, should and will behave at parties, and that’s on the rare occasions they are even allowed to go. Could some conspiracy have existed, where a swarm of selfish men coerced the babysitting industry so they could frequently go out alone and fool around, while Mommy’s reluctance to protest grew? For some ladies, only angry developed. Finally, they felt fed up with their issued blackballing from mankind. In fact, a whole swarm of these women decided it was prime time for the title to be humankind, damn it! Martin’s girlfriend had lived through enough. She didn’t want to sit at home every night while Martin went out. She didn’t want to be told how much she could drink at a party and she sure as fuck didn’t want to hear Martin insult her good friends to their face for no good reason at all. Alas, she left him. But, many of the women never do. The resentment grows for them; until they finally partake to the same private activities their boyfriends were involved in. For the ladies, it’s wasn’t always a chemical drive, or urge to get slut-drunk and fuck around, an urge to get even. They felt betrayed. The stifled emotions of men who don’t know how to be men suddenly became their messages. But what were the messages? Seclusion? Discrimination? Were they messengers of love’s inescapable miscarriage? Messengers of subpoenaed psychosexual frustration? Speaking of messengers…
“Lookie what we gotti here.” Dumah’s eye’s considered an undernourished twenty-something, wearing no more than a thrift-shopped jacket with questionably arranged slashes near the biceps. Martin’s face was rusty as western politics. Something had been ripped from his heart, and only one girl could alleviate the sting.
“Divine intervention…” Dumah patted the young man’s back, speaking slowly.
“What do you want? My money?”
“No, no, everytime, geez, no. Money won’t redeem you, son. It won’t mend your broken heart.”
“…How’d you… what is this? How are you not cold in just a short-sleeve shirt?”
“I should ask the same, kid. That jacket is thinner than Heaven’s entry guidelines.”
A group of snowboard-jacketed monks in a slow chain strolled by praying, simply by chance, no relation to the fallen angels hustling prayers out of young or homeless atheists.
Above them a unique constellation laid (or was it getting laid?). It took the shape of a vagina’s lips, a dazzling cocaine shimmer. In the center, a distant star, perhaps going supernova, erupted with all the flare of a Manhattan handbag boutique, the respective luminosity spilled outward from the clitoral heart of the complete celestial portrait. Cosmic rays drenched the astronomical genitals, dripping down the cosmos’ silky, black thighs.
Deoxyribonucleic acid can spread through physical instruments, all by the means of love (or sadly, in some deranged cases, emotions furthest from it). Life itself needs a womb to develop. Be it tight and flesh-shielded, or vast and cosmically unbound: the womb is essential. Essential as a young, heartbroken boy needs an apartment to get drunk in, life needs a tomb in the launch, before unavoidably revisiting one later on with mineral grandeur. As devious plans are born out of old, white-palms rubbing together, or as long-lasting connections are born in lonely streets, life is born in a vault and dies in a vault. Some regions may turn to a deflagration exit; thus, the fire becomes their grave, their wormhole into new dimensions of body and spirit, forever ablaze. Might the soul of a former world-leader be lighting your cigarette? All the while, the three stared upward at the pornographic constellation.
It would seem that love was in the air.
“I... wait, what is going on! Coatless mindreaders? Vaginas in the sky? Stylish monks!?”
“Forget those monks!” Dumah said turning his back towards the boy. “You may not have believed in angels before, but… uh, what’s your name?”
“You don’t know my name but you know about my recent breakup?”
Some stared out their windows, sinusitis prevented tears at the pornographic constellation, but it may not have been an anomaly. The screens carried in pockets, atop cabinets, used as billboards, all the screens which locked the eyes in a propaganda crossfire of information, forever revised, never teaching them about the love in space, or of space, or of love.
“Where’s the penis?” asked Martin.
“Perhaps a earth-made obelisk could penetrate the Big Clit-per?” Ramiel said chewing on one finger.
“Well, Switzerland sent a janitorial rocket up in space recently to clean up the little debris they ever released,” Dumah uttered quietly, “God bless them. In fact, he just might bless the Swiss! Uh, son, Son! You must worship! It’s the only way towards salvation. God is real, my son! God exists and needs prayers! They’re like his vitamins. Don’t you believe? The proof is all around you!”
The loveless Martin Septum inspected the ambiance of a violent whiteout. Things didn’t seem to be improving. In the distance, it appeared one of the fashionable monks was being greeted by a stranger’s handshake! …Wait, no, it wasn’t that, apparently, he was being held up at gunpoint. A hold up rather than a handshake… is this God’s work? Martin wondered.
“No… I don’t see any proof. I’ve never seen God, but,” he pulled out a compact mirror; one his ex-girlfriend had left in his apartment. It was a perky red, adorned with a gemstone shaped as a cherry, “I’ve seen love before. I don’t see God, but damnit I’ve seen love! Love is real. There’s even a science to it. Yeah, you can argue its just neurochemicals, but that just proves it! Evidence of something driving love, releasing love, breeding love, it is there… and… I guess I should have been more faithful, and done more of what she wanted. I never wanted to cheat, it just all happened so fast.”
Slight tears poured out, hardening to icy diamonds.
“I hurt her… I truly never wanted to! A broken heart is my cross to bear now.” Martin walked away morosely, ignoring the hustling angels. He said to himself, “but love lives on. Love will never die. She’ll find the right guy. There are lots of good guys out there… it’s a smart thing to accept when you haven’t been one of them…”
Martin Septum vanished within the blizzard.
At the intersection of Carter Lane and Polk Ave, by The Dead Swans Café, walked a group of hearing impaired students. They were signing to each other:
“Imagine if the winter never ended.”
“By the nine divines! That’d be awful.”
“Of course it wouldn’t happen.”
“Imagine if the earth just never orbited back to the sun, if gravity became all apathetic and stopped caring by stopping what it’s carrying. If the earth acted like we act…”
“But, imagine! We take for granted physics, and science, and never prepare for the worst. It took years for my parents to even realize I was deaf. Wasn’t until a thunderstorm woke up the whole house but not me.”
“I don’t want to imagine a never ending winter.”
“What if we were in the beginning of a nuclear winter? Imagine if some portion was removed from the map, with extensive research done to replicate the citizens, so that any of their communicating friends and families abroad could still be duped into believing they were alive? Governments can simulate lives, can create holograms to fool tourists, but they can’t bribe Mother Nature… or so they thought. She likely took the money and wiped her cunt with it.
“Hey! Be careful what you sign!”
“It is more likely Mother Nature is dying from old age.”
“Maybe she’s got Alzheimer’s?”
“I don’t know! I don’t get why you’re so doom and gloom.”
“It’s fucking depressing!”
The deaf students suddenly broke out into a rumble, and strangely enough, found time to sign trash talk to each other.
Our two hateful leads wandered Polk past an abandoned movie theatre. It never went out of business, the workers humbly stopped coming in. The moonlight was hitting hard like lead. Sitting on a bird’s nest-themed bench was an accordion player. He produced a slow tango waltz, mourning the disappointed angel incarnations as they walked past. His smile was that of a madman, who had given up, surrendered to the melodies of life in all its risks and evictions, its cancers and conspiracies. Beside the musician was an even madder hobo waving a lit cigarette like a conductor’s baton. Dumah and Ramiel knew better than to proselytize the madcaps.
“You ever wonder… if he can be, you know, abdicated?” Dumah asked Ramiel with a set of eyes shaded like pneumonia.
With fingers pointing upwards, Ramiel asked, “You mean… the boss man?”
“Yeah, you know, I’m just saying, to run the show for an eternity, seems, a bit pretentious, yeah? How’s ‘bout a reform? Or, say, a coup d’état?”
“A coup d’état in heaven?”
Ramiel wasn’t sure if he should clap or puke. Such contemplation was grounds for divorce. A divorce from authority and privilege. To even reach the rank of angelhood was cutthroat enough! Would the throw of the divine dice be worth it?
It was then; with sunrise moments away they saw a weeping single-father on his knees, with snow up to his waist.
A bare arm rose to point at the half-snowman, half-human. “There.” Spoke a grave messenger of god, pointing at a man being buried with snow. Would the neglected recyclable bin behind him become his gravesite? The single-daddy’s epitaph would read, “THE PLANET’S DYING!!”
“What troubles you, brother?” asked Dumah as they approached the man.
“My… awh, god, my daughter, she’s missing! We…” among his sobbing, “we were walking home from the 7/11, and, Ahhh fuck, I hope your not cops, ahh, we, w-uah, we lost grip of each other’s hands, she, could be anywhere! Even under the snow! I walked for a mile to realize only her mitten was in, in, auhhh, in my hand!”
Ramiel bent down, eye to eye with the crying father. His voice was prepped with the holiness of a last-minute rescue. With the warmth of July, the wisdom of each November, the enthralling eyes of dreams come true, a transmission in soft arteries, each tooth a channel of catechisms and parables, a saintly love from his chin to his scrotum: he spoke to the solo-dad.
“Pray. PRAY! You must pray to the lord that not only she lives on, but also her body, minus hypothermia, will find the strength to raise her gloveless hand from the snow! To show you! Only you! Her loving father where she lies and awaits to be saved!”
For a brief moment, the snow stopped, the stars shined as lighthouses.
“I will do it! I will! Please, pray with me! The more prayers the merrier! Err, I mean, the better!” Ramiel and Dumah got down on their knees beside him and prayed.
While spellbound as method actors like them would, they were ambushed from behind! A little girl propelled from under the snow holding a large piece of stained-glass. She forced it downward on top of the two angels shoving their incarnations to be eternally trapped within the cathedral decoration. As it fell, any body parts out of reach were, in the fashion of a vortex, sucked within the ecclesiastical product.
It would seem the heavenly hustlers were no match for American felons.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about you two. Mostly from the crazies. I listen to the crazies. Hell, I’d sooner get an education from them over the shitty school districts this country has shat out.” He stood up with ease and picked up his daughter. “They moan and pant and ramble on about hunstlin’ angels, always trying to get them to pray. I decided to debunk the myth, and sure enough,” the con artist knocked on the stained glass containing an angry-faced Dumah, “you weren’t bullshit! You were the real deal. There was only one-way to capture you little fucks. I must say,” he smiled at his little girl, who held an equally evil grin, “we’re quite excited to frame you two in the living room. About time you dead spirits did some living.”
The father and daughter carried the stained-glass window down Polk Ave with the early sunrise reflecting the images of Ramiel and Dumah, the cunning angels.
In the transient nighttime, they looked more like sniveling hoodlums.
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
