Zachary

When I first saw Zachary, he was shredding love letters down the library stairs.

I was a freshman, barely eighteen and younger than that inside. At my suburban high school, I’d been enough of a rebel to think myself worldly, and enough of a grind to expect my classes to be easy. My roommate, Miranda, was a witty, handsome girl, and I was sure we’d be best friends. I had my campus map and my parents’ phone card. I had been assigned my first real paper, and I was in the library to do research. I was feeling very collegiate, very competent.

Then I walked into a snow of perfumed paper, and the moment slowed. I became aware of the sunlight oozing down the stairs, thought the scraps of paper hesitated when they touched its beams. I put out my hand and a piece shaped like Ohio fell into it. I read the fragments on it:

ne thing, it wou
an’t even be sure yo
ust once? Once? Fo

Only then did I look up to see where this was coming from. Leaning over the rail of the landing above was a boy with hair the color of varnished pine and eyes like mirrors, ripping a page to tiny shreds with an expression of contented absorption. Tearing up this paper was apparently as enjoyable to him as cooking or painting might be to someone else.

“What are you doing?” I said, medium-loud.

He carefully finished reducing his current page to bits and withdrew another pink envelope from his coat pocket before he even seemed to see me. “Spring cleaning,” he said. “Want to help?”

“Sure,” I said automatically. Curiosity drew me up the stairs to join him.

He was wearing clothes that would have gotten him pegged as a loser at any high school in the country: stained jeans that sagged at the seat, shiny old-fashioned dress shoes, a too-small t-shirt in an ugly shade of orange, a blue corduroy jacket that must have been thirty years old. His hair was raggedly chopped in the vicinity of his shoulders, as if he’d cut it himself. He almost looked like he ought to fit with the stoner crowd, except for the clarity of his eyes and the way he held his chin up like a prince. He knew he was beautiful. He wore those ugly clothes as contrast, and though I didn’t know then that it was deliberate, it worked.

“Are those letters?” I asked stupidly.

“Fetters,” he answered.

I tried to muster something from my brain besides cheerleader-level babbling. “Best strike them off, then.”

“Here. You try.” He put an envelope into my hand. It was pastel blue, with stickers of moons and stars all over it, addressed in a feminine hand. It had been torn raggedly open, and its contents were grubby and crumpled. This letter had been read many times. Pulling the sheets of blue paper out, I read:

Zachary my delirium,
Have you got any idea what you’re doing to me? Was it your intention all along to tear my heart out of my chest, or was that an afterthought?

It was snatched out of my hand. “Don’t read. Just rip.”

“These are love letters.”

“Yes. They’re precious. Irreplaceable. No one will ever write these words again, to me or anyone. Archaeological treasures.” He tore the sheaf of pages down the middle and handed me half. “Destroy them.”

I gave a half-hearted rip. Then another. I began to hear the sound of the ripping, notice the way the paper feathered at the torn edges, the prose reduced to experimental poetry by the motion of my hands. I leaned out and released a cloud of blue pieces like a flock of birds.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” he said.

“I think...” I didn’t have words for what I wanted to say. It had finally dawned on me that people didn’t do this sort of thing. I tried to back up to a place where I knew the rules. “I’m Cynthia. You must be Zachary.”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at me.

“I have to go study now. I’ve got a paper due.”

He disposed of the blue envelope and pulled out another pink one from the voluminous pockets of his ugly coat.

“Whatever,” I said at last, feeling snubbed. “I’ll see you later.”

“A prophesy,” he said in an absent tone. Not to me.

After a while immersed in the minutiae of my research, I forgot to wonder about Zachary. When I remembered, I’d already fit him into a box. He was one of those eccentric people that you find around the edges of any novel about college life; he was there to add color. I’d just had a brush with the College Character. I’d tell Miranda about him, and we’d laugh.


Miranda didn’t laugh.

“Him,” she said in hushed tones. “God, I’m so in love with him.”

“He’s cute,” I agreed.

“He’s crazy. Fantabulously rich, gets his clothes out of dumpsters. Lives off campus. In a church.”

I nodded wisely. The College Character in a nutshell. “Cool.”

“Yeah. He won’t talk to us, though. You have to have some kind of art grant before he’ll allow you the privilege of failing to date him.”

“Well, he’s either a snob or a headcase.”

Miranda searched the ceiling for words. “I guess it’s not really a snob thing, just a boy thing, but taken to an extreme. I mean, these were love letters he was shredding, right? Think about it.”

“Bad breakup?”

“Maybe.” She sounded skeptical.

“How do you hear all this stuff, anyway? You haven’t been here any longer than I have.”

“Mojo Kitty,” she said. At least, that was what it sounded like.

“Excuse me?”

“This great coffee shop over by the bookstore on the north end of campus. I went over there to study one day and it was love at first mocha. All the incurable gossips hang out there.”

So I was distracted, and didn’t return to the subject of Zachary. It was easy to let it go. The impact of his presence had faded, and the gossip seemed to fit him neatly into the pigeonhole I’d prepared for him.


Several weeks passed. The last effects of summer wore off. The leaves turned. I spent some time at the Mojo Kitty Cafe with Miranda, but her chatty friends there kept me from studying, so I spent my free time in the library or in the dorm.
There came a day at the beginning of October when one of my afternoon classes was canceled. Cut loose for several hours, I considered returning to the dorm, but it was such a classic kind of day I would have felt like Emily Dickinson if I’d spent it hiding in my room. I wandered around campus, and eventually found myself at the cafe.

Miranda’s crowd wasn’t around, to my relief. I ordered mango soda, found a table in a sunny corner, and settled down to read.

I was so deep in my book that I jumped and screeched like a cat when something hit my table with a slap. As I pressed my hand to my chest to calm my pounding heart, I saw it was a hardcover book, and that it was Zachary who’d thrown it down.

“Ouch,” I said, which wasn’t the right thing but as close as I could get.

“Tell me what you think of this.”

Presumably he meant the book, so I opened it. Ornate verse stared me in the face, the words looking like a foreign language after my startlement. Deliberately taking deep breaths, I calmed myself to read. It was English after all, but English warped and twisted to fit a meter it didn’t like. “You want my opinion,” I said tentatively.

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

I closed the book, looked into his face to guess what he wanted my opinion to be. I couldn’t tell; his eyes were the pale blue-gray of an overcast morning, and about as informative. Then I noticed what I was doing, that I was trying to tell him what he wanted to hear, which was a high school thing to do. Anyway, it couldn’t do me any good to adopt his opinions; even if he were hitting on me -- which I doubted, because I wasn’t an artist -- I didn’t think I wanted to date the College Character. So I told the truth. “Honestly? I don’t like Byron. I don’t like Romantic poetry in general.”

“Why?”

“Why?” I shoved the book back at him, unsettled by the fact that he was still standing. “It’s a lie. Like... flowers in a mall. It’s too polite. It’s afraid to say what it means. I hate the Romantics. They couldn’t see what was right in front of their noses. Here’s Keats beating us to death with poor old Hyperion and his damned inaccessible blonde, and William Carlos Williams got ten times as much romance into a few lines about some plums. Why are you standing there like this is a job interview? Sit down.”

He sat, as if he’d been waiting for permission. “And what do you think of me?”

I’d heard that line before, and it was an insecure boy’s pickup standard. I was beginning to get annoyed. “I think you’re a space alien. And your species can’t have been in contact with Earth that long, because you’re doing it all wrong.”

He smiled. It looked deliberate. “What should I be doing differently?”

“Well, for starters, you never introduced yourself.”

“True.”

“And -- why are you talking to me in the first place? What exactly are you after?”

“A girl who hates Byron.”

I raised an eyebrow and said, “And what good would that do you?”

“It would spare me a lot of drama.”

I took a moment to chew on that. To say to my face that he was choosing me -- for whatever -- because I wouldn’t annoy him with dramatics, as if my acquiescence could be assumed -- it offended me. I had several options. I could go along with it; that one got a few votes, on the basis of his delicious face, but my dislike of his manner vetoed the bill. I could try to bring all this down to the level of ordinary polite conversation -- probably a huge and delicate undertaking, if it were even possible. Or I could teach him what his medicine tasted like.

At eighteen, a perfect revenge, however small, is one of the greatest pleasures in life. I returned his bland look for a handful of seconds. Then I collected the book I’d been reading before he’d appeared and went back to reading it. I did the thing properly, too; I didn’t just pretend to read, but actually retraced the thread of my reading and picked it up. I knew that would come across.

Eventually a pair of pale fingers hooked over my book and pulled it down. “Cynthia.”

A point. I pressed it. “Are you still here? You have what you want: no drama.”

“Come pose for me. I want to paint you.”

It was a pickup after all. And he, narcissistic creature, was clearly confident that I would be delighted to come to his place of residence and take my clothes off, because I was a freshman and not particularly pretty. Anger reared up, wearing a mask of righteous pride. I said, “Maybe if you give me a dollar for every time someone’s told you you’re beautiful.”

Zachary stood up. “I’m afraid I’ve lost count,” he said; coolly, but with a kind of respect. He left the cafe.

The book he’d brought was still on the table. I flipped through it, perhaps with the vague idea in mind that someone who came across the way Zachary did wouldn’t just forget his book, but meant me to look at it. It didn’t take long to find what he’d wanted me to see. A folded sheet bearing a pencil sketch of me with my hand out, catching a bit of paper. His pencil strokes were choppy and confident, and caught the shape and flavor of me without much detail. Zachary was a talented artist.

And he knew it, and wanted me to know it, and that made me angry. I put the drawing back in the book and shoved the book to the far edge of the table. When I left, I didn’t take it with me.


Miranda was shocked when I told her the story. “I can’t believe you turned him down,” she told me. “I don’t know whether to admire you or kick your ass. Don’t you know every girl on campus is trying to get into his pants?”

“Come on,” I scoffed.

“Well, not the sorority types, but you know what I mean. All the arty types. All the English majors.”

“Then he should have done his research before hitting on me. I’m going for biochem. Although maybe that’s what he was up to with that line about sparing him drama -- he got sick of artists and now he’s going after scientists.”

“I can’t believe you turned him down,” she said again.

We were at the Mojo, just the two of us, and it was more than a week later. I’d waited this long to relate the story because I didn’t feel like sharing it with her little kaffe-klatch, and she was never in the dorm anymore except to sleep. I had begun to think that we wouldn’t be best friends after all unless I wanted to be more public than I was comfortable with; Miranda didn’t like to be alone or quiet. I’d come out to the cafe in a conscious effort to get to know her better, but I was regretting it. The place was too crowded. I couldn’t keep track of all the people around me, and that has always bothered me.

In the intervening time I’d weighed and discarded two boys, one my own age and one a grad student of 26; the first was immature, the second dull with maturity. It had crossed my mind several times that Zachary had a certain appeal, that his confidence was intriguing as well as irritating, but would rather have shaved off my eyebrows than go looking for him.

But Miranda clearly cared only for his beauty. I said, “If you’ve got such a crush on him, why don’t you ask him out?”

“I wish,” she said bleakly. “I know he won’t talk to me, though. I’m not interesting enough.”

“And I am? You’re way prettier than me, Miranda. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re a snappy dresser -- if he’ll go after a geek like me, you’ve definitely got a chance.”

This brought a smile -- everyone likes compliments. There was an element of bitterness in it, though. “Yeah, I’m smart and pretty exactly like every other girl around here. I bet I know why he likes you. It’s because you’re unusual. I mean, you’re not pretty in the ordinary way, but you’re striking.”

“Thanks,” I said, and left it at that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know exactly what about me was unusual. “I doubt he actually likes me, though. I think he just wanted to get laid and figured I was an easy target. I hate guys like that. You know, the ones who go after the fat chicks and the girls with glasses or bad haircuts because they’re more likely to be desperate.”

“Oh, like he needs --” She broke off, looking past me at the door. I turned to follow her gaze, and saw that some of the gossips had come in. They’d seen us, so it was too late to run. Miranda waved.

They came and joined our table. There was Linda, a gangly redhead with a clever haircut, big front teeth, and sly little glasses; Ann, a blonde from a tiny town up north who didn’t yet know that her Marilyn Monroe figure wasn’t her only asset; and Jon, a sweet-tempered, baby-faced goth whom I would have given my right arm to date if he weren’t queer as a seventeen-dollar bill. It was Jon who opened the conversation with his customary greeting:

“CAFFEINE!”

“Good stuff,” Miranda agreed.

Jon gestured to my mango soda and said, “Infidel.”

“Sugar,” I clarified.

Linda said, “Parasail. Fling. Collate. This conversation needed some verbs,” she added in explanation.

“So,” said Miranda. “Guess who had a shot at Zachary and turned him down?” She aimed a thumb at me. I scowled at her for this betrayal, though I’d never actually told her not to bring it up.

“You’re kidding,” Linda said.

Jon said, “Good for you, honey.”

“Why?” said Ann.

“Because,” I explained, “I don’t like the way he just assumes all he has to do is ask. I really don’t get why everybody’s so fascinated with him. I mean, he’s not actually friends with any of you, right?”

“Jon used to date him,” Linda said.

“Really?”

Jon looked away. “Yeah, for like a week, like a year ago. He’s an asshole.”

“And you’re still not over him,” said Miranda.

Jon didn’t answer. I could tell that this conversation was making him unhappy, so I tried to change the subject. “I love your shirt, Jon.” It was a ‘Lenore’ shirt, the one with the little dead girl dragging her dead cat around. “Did you get the new compilation?”

Relief crossed his face, and he opened his mouth to answer, but Miranda wasn’t going to let go of Zachary. “Cynthia was saying that maybe Zachary’s tired of artists and he’s chasing scientists now.”

“Looking for a challenge, huh? That sounds like him. It’s all a game to him, and he’s bored by how he keeps winning.” Linda lifted her glass, but didn’t seem inclined to leave a conversational opening by drinking from it. “I heard about him when I came here last year, and he’d gone through a normal-girl phase and a rich-girl phase, and then I met him through Jon when he was in his gay-boy phase, and then he went through the musicians in about five seconds and started in on the artists. You missed your chance, Cyn. Now he’ll just pick a different science nerd at random.”

“What a jerk,” said Ann.

“Yeah,” I said. “Now I’m extra glad I ignored him.”

Ann said, “So what did he do, ask you on a date, or what?”

“Said he wanted to paint me. Asked me to pose for him. What’s that, like the third-oldest line ever?”

“Yeah,” said Jon, “Right after ‘Og want fuck’ and ‘You look really pretty tonight.’ He was a little more creative with me. He said I was the first boy he’d ever been attracted to and wanted me to show him the ropes. Oh ferchrissakes,” he added when Miranda and Linda laughed at him. “I was a kid, okay?”

“I bet he’s got diseases,” said Ann.

I said, “Look, I’m getting really tired of talking about him. He’s annoying, and now I find out he’s a slut, and okay, I admit he’s gorgeous, but so what? I don’t see why everyone’s so excited.”

“Where to begin?” Linda settled back in her seat as if about to begin a long tale. “There’s the fact that he’s rich, has an amazing apartment and throws parties like you just don’t see anymore, like something out of Fitzgerald. He’s a brilliant artist. He’s got like a 200 IQ --”

“There’s no such thing,” I interjected, but she didn’t pause.

“-- and no one’s ever seen him lose his cool. Probably it’s that last thing. Everybody wants to be the one to get a reaction out of him.”

“Not me,” I said.

“It’s not possible,” Jon said bleakly.

Ann got a faraway look and said slowly, “I bet he’s really lonely.”

“If he is,” I said, “it’s his own damn fault. And we’re still talking about him. Could we quit please?”

Miranda grinned. “Aww, does it bother you? Strike a nerve, maybe?”

“No! I mean, not the way you think. It bothers me that all of you are obsessed with this guy who’s obviously not good for anything but keeping his clothes warm. And they’re such ugly clothes!”

Everyone laughed.

“How the hell old is he, anyway? It sounds like he’s been around for a while.”

“Forever,” Linda said. “I think he started college early. At like fifteen.”

Ann said, “Then he should be done by now, right?”

“He would be if he ever went to classes,” Jon said. “He told me he was nineteen, but apparently --”

“He’s been saying nineteen for about three years,” Linda finished.

“That’s just weird,” Ann said.

“I don’t care,” said Miranda. “I don’t care if he’s fifty.”

“Fifty thousand,” Jon said. “He’s the Devil.”

I snorted. “Somebody’s seen The Ninth Gate too many times. I bet the devil would be a frat boy. The big, mean, manipulative kind who talks high school girls into bed and refuses to wear a condom.”

Ann flinched. Miranda said, “Sounds like you’re talking from personal experience.”

“I wasn’t the girl.” I gave her a hard look. For once she seemed to get the message to drop it.

“The Devil was an angel once,” Jon said.

“That clinches it, then,” I snapped, “because an angel would have better fucking things to do than hang around a college and mess with people’s heads. If I were an immortal being with true knowledge of the order of the universe, I sure wouldn’t give a damn if I got laid!”

Linda and Miranda laughed. Jon looked uncomfortable. Ann just looked confused.

As I finished talking, the person at the table opposite where I was sitting got up, collecting dishes; a person about whom I could see nothing except that he or she was wearing a ratty sweatshirt with the hood up. I wasn’t paying much attention, but enough to notice that this person, after dumping his or her glass in the bus bin, walked away without coming back for the notebook he or she had been writing in.

“Hey!” I called out. “Hey, in the green sweatshirt, you forgot your notebook!”

The person didn’t seem to hear me. I leapt up and ran to grab the notebook, meaning to give chase. A glance at the page stopped me.

It was Zachary’s; after only one look at his work I recognized his style instantly. It was a depiction of the five of us clustered around our table like vultures around a corpse; with a few strokes he’d caricatured us, making Ann look eager and stupid, Jon mopey and self-pitying, Miranda wolfish, Linda self-satisfied... and he’d drawn me with an expression of self-righteous condemnation, holding forth like a judge at a witch trial.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” everyone was demanding. “What is it?”

I didn’t wait to explain. I dashed out of the cafe, onto the sidewalk, searching for a green sweatshirt. I saw no one wearing green, no one even the right height and build to be Zachary in a different coat. He had vanished.

And as I stood there trying to remember everything I’d said about him that he might have overheard, I realized he’d had his back turned the whole time we were there. How could he have drawn us so well, our relative positions, what we were wearing, where on the table people had put their cups, when he couldn’t have seen us?

I rushed back in, looking for a mirror, a reflective window, that he could have used to see us, but there was nothing like that. Not even a shiny-sided napkin dispenser on the table. Again my acquaintances assaulted me with questions. I ignored them, stuffing the notebook into my backpack before they could see it.

“Where does Zachary live?” I demanded.


It was dark by the time I found the place. It wouldn’t have been far by car, but I was taking unfamiliar busses whose schedules I didn’t know, and I had to walk farther than I’d expected. The air was growing cold, the wind picking up. The skin of my legs was numb by the time I saw the many-colored glow in gothic-arched windows at the end of a run-down residential street.

It was true, then. He really did live in a church.

The building was small, not much larger than the houses I’d been walking past, but the lot it sat on was three times as large at least as the rest of the properties. The yard was overgrown, as if no one had touched it in decades; it looked like it ought to be a graveyard, but of course the contents of the graves would have been moved when the church was deconsecrated, which it must have been if someone could turn it into an apartment and live in it.

Ordinarily those thoughts would have sufficed. On this cold autumn night, though, knowing that while I had the option to leave without doing what I came to do it would be far more trouble than I could justify, other thoughts began to intrude. Thoughts like: when holy ground is deconsecrated, isn’t that a little like a curse? Why was the church allowed to become an ordinary non-holy building anyway? How had Zachary drawn me and the gossips without turning around and showing his face?

As I drew nearer, I began to think that there was something off about the windows. I’d seen that they were full of colors, and assumed that they were stained glass, but as I got to where I could see them better I noticed that there were no black lines dividing the colors. Further, the pictures in them were not the kind of pictures one would expect in a Midwestern church less than a century old. There were no crosses, no Christ, no lambs or disciples. Each window contained one angel, each angel different, their wings not white but blue or purple or scarlet.

They were painted, I realized. Painted on the glass. Zachary had done them. They were all wearing modern clothing. Some were male, most female. Each of them held some symbolic object : a flame, a rose, a cup.

I envied the people who lived on this street, that their every night was illuminated by these windows.

A wide walk led up to a pair of heavy wooden doors. Straggling lilac bushes nearly blocked it. I pushed through them, to find that there was an ordinary-looking doorbell button beside the door. I pushed it, and heard a rasping buzzer sound inside.

I waited. I pushed the button again. I waited some more.

What if he wasn’t home? In fact, it seemed likely that he wasn’t, that I had come all the way out here for nothing, and what had I been thinking anyway? Maybe that I wanted to have some kind of confrontation, something I couldn’t do over the phone, or maybe I figured that a doorbell is harder to ignore than a telephone -- there’s no answering machine for the door.

Or maybe I just wanted to see his face again. Maybe I was a sucker just like everyone else.

I clutched my backpack and schooled my face to a scowl: that was not the reason. I’d come because I was angry, and curious. Maybe I felt obligated to apologize for the nasty gossip he’d overheard, give him a chance to refute it. Anyway, I’d wasted enough time. I was frozen and tired. I had better things to do. I would keep the notebook, or throw it away, or take it back to the Mojo and turn it in. After leaving it out as a nasty message, he didn’t deserve to have it back.

I rang the buzzer again.

A few moments later, there were unlocking sounds from the door, and it opened a few inches. One silvery eye and a wing of butter-yellow hair were all I could see.

“I’m freezing my ass off out here,” I said.

He opened the door wide and stood aside so I could come in. It wasn’t much warmer inside, and though it was brighter the shadows were confusing. Light spilled down from what must have been the choir loft. It was barely enough to show the big, empty room that had once contained pews, and now held only a few haphazard chairs and tables clustered by the walls. A good place for parties, but not a place to live.

Zachary shut the door and locked the deadbolt. He walked away toward a stair leading up to the loft, without wasting breath on obvious things like welcoming me or telling me to follow. I wished I could explore the place without him there; I wished it were my house.

The choir loft was a sort of balcony running along both sides of the church. The arched windows I’d seen lit from outside began at the floor of this balcony and were about ten or twelve feet tall. Zachary led me to the side away from the street, and here I saw that not all these windows had angels in them. The farthest two, the one nearest the end where the altar should have been, were blank. A paint-spattered stepladder leaned nearby.

It was clear that he lived up here. There was a futon, a broken-down couch, and a large antique trunk with clothes spilling out. A chaotic mess of books littered every flat surface, including most of the floor. The light came from thrift-shop lamps plugged into a chain of power strips. I noticed that there was no stereo, there were no CD’s anywhere. Zachary didn’t listen to music.

He went to a mostly clear area of floor and sat down, crosslegged, looking up at me like a cat. Not even really expectant, just looking. I was seized with a desire to make him do something, the same urge that makes people tap the glass of aquariums. I choked it down.

When I pulled the notebook out of my bag, he reached for it with neither thanks nor apology. That didn’t excuse me from my obligation, though. I had to say what I’d come to say. Get done with it.

“I’m sorry,” I told him stiffly. “Obviously the things that you heard me and the others say about you bothered you. I mean, understandably, because they were mostly pretty rotten. I apologize for my part in that. I shouldn’t have participated in that conversation at all.”

Zachary smiled so carefully I could see the process of the smile’s construction. “So you don’t really think I’m a worthless evil slut?”

“I don’t have enough data to judge you.”

“And when you learn enough about someone, then you judge them.”

“Well, yeah. No one wants to admit it, but everyone does it.”

“If everyone judges, how do you think I’ve judged you?”

“I don’t know. You can tell me if you want to.”

His smile began to be a bit more genuine. “You’re cold, you know that?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I just wanted to say that I shouldn’t have taken gossip as gospel. And I wanted to give you the chance to answer to it.”

“Mostly it’s true,” he said, “except that it’s not a game. It’s a quest.” He gestured to the paintings on the windows. “For something more real than anything you’ve ever known. So real you don’t even have a frame of reference for it. Why are you standing there as if this is a job interview? Sit down.”

I smiled despite myself. “Fair enough.” I sat. I didn’t want to sit too close, but the patch of clear floor was small; I had to be within arm’s reach unless I wanted to sit on a pile of books. “So what’s this quest of yours that’s worth breaking poor Jon’s heart?”

Zachary made an expression of disapproval, as if I’d said something stupid. “I never promised him anything. He just assumed. Judged without adequate data, as you’d say. I only ever told the truth to him.”

“What truth did you tell him?” I sounded as scornful as I could.

“That he’s lovely and charming, that I liked various things about him, and he assumed that this meant I was his lover and that we would try to continue as we were until it ultimately became untenable and necessitated a breakup, perhaps years in the future. Then I told him that I had learned all I could from him and didn’t want to see him anymore, and he assumed that he had done something wrong, or that I’d intended to hurt him. He broke his own heart. He set up an elaborate machine to break it for him. Everyone always does that.”

“And you think I’m cold,” I said.

“That’s why I want you to pose for me. I need another angel. Just one more. I think you’re more likely to be the one than any of the others.”

“The one what?”

“The one that works,” he said simply.

A shiver went down across my skin. It sounded as if he were hinting at some romantic intensity no one had ever felt toward me before. I wanted, suddenly, to believe that, wanted it badly -- for someone who had never even touched my hand to decide that I was probably The One. Except that I knew that to be the sort of assumption that caused people to break themselves against the rocks of Zachary’s lonely shore. He probably meant something entirely different.

“You said one, but you have two windows left,” I said.

“The last one’s for me.”

“I see. I suppose I could keep chipping away at you until you explain what sort of machine you want to make me a gear in, but frankly I don’t see what I’d get out of the deal except jerked around, so there’s no point. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me use your phone to call a cab.”

“I’ll explain,” he promised. “You can stay for a while. Are you hungry?”

Once he’d said it, I was ravenous. I nodded.

“You can look at the books,” he offered as he left.

Presumably the church had a kitchen somewhere. There should also be offices, a basement, a whole lot of space besides what I could see, and I wondered what he did with it. Visions of bodies in the basement crossed my mind. Zachary did kind of have a serial killer vibe. But I looked up at the windows and realized that he didn’t need to kill people to keep them.

He needed another angel, did he? That implied that these windows were portraits of his conquests. I stood and walked along the balcony, careful not to step on any books. About halfway along, I found Jon.

Apparently Jon’s hair had been longer a year ago, and dyed blue, unless that was artistic license. Zachary had painted him wearing a classic goth club-going outfit, tight leather pants and a fishnet shirt, a silver collar around his throat, black-rimmed eyes and lush red lips. In his black-nailed hands he cradled a dead bird. His face was full of helpless sorrow; a small child’s first experience of death, begging : Make it alive again! It was a brilliant portrait, a brilliant piece of art, the aggressive sexuality of Jon’s clothing and painted face contrasted with the breaking innocence in his expression. The blue-green peacock-feathered wings were extraneous.

Now that I’d seen this, I gave more attention to the other angels. A frail-necked black girl in the stiff pose of an Egyptian queen, holding a sawtoothed gear, challenging me to ask her what it was for; a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, lush and muscular, with serene and hopeful smile, pouring out a double handful of seeds; a tall, angular boy, cupping bleeding hands full of broken glass, whose dark green eyes were full of such layers of hope buried under pain buried under cynicism buried under calm that I wanted to bring the stepladder over and examine the paint with a magnifying glass to figure out how Zachary had done it.

And he wanted to paint me onto the second-to-last window? Paint me with skill like this? And I was refusing simply because I disliked his attitude? I was changing my mind. This was genius.

Zachary came back just as I was going to go to the other side to look at the rest of the paintings, and I met him on the stairs. He had a Chinese lacquered tray, and offered it to me. I’d expected either cold pizza still in its box or lobster and caviar. What I got was spaghetti-o’s in a gorgeous porcelain bowl, two rice balls on a square steel plate that looked like it was meant to be a candleholder, a silver spoon, and a can of mango soda.

I thanked him, but that was all; it just didn’t seem like complimenting the meal or exclaiming over the dishes was going to be worth the breath. So I just went back to the place where he’d had me sit before, and ate the meal in silence. While I did, I thought about how he’d noticed that I liked mango. He could have been very romantic if he’d cared to be.

Zachary sat there watching me eat, apparently unaware or uncaring that it might make me uncomfortable. When I was about half finished, he said, “What I’m doing is magic. Not the way everyone else does, though. Not incantations and crystals. The real thing.”

I gave him a brief skeptical stare, then returned to my meal.

“There are legends about magicians able to separate themselves from their shadows; or to separate or harm or control the shadows of others. The apocryphal story of the natives who thought the camera would steal their soul comes from an intimation of the truth about the nature of pictures. Where everyone has it wrong is in supposing that the outward trappings of magic *are* magic; that you need a ritual, you need to wear funny clothes or use symbols.” He paused in thought. “Symbols. Everything we see is a symbol. You and I are symbols. It’s what we symbolize that I’m trying to find.”

I swallowed the last of the rice, washed it down with the last of the soda. “That’s a quest, all right.”

“And now you think I’m insane.”

“Now? I figured out you’re nuts as soon as I saw you don’t listen to music.” I set the tray aside. “So basically what you want to do is paint my soul and use that to fuck with my head.”

“No.” Zachary actually looked a little distressed. “No. It’s not about control, Cynthia. I want you to understand that.”

“Then what the hell is it about?”

“Truth. I told you. The hidden core of a person, the shadow side that holds the power. I only want to find it, not manipulate it. I think I’ve come very close with a few of them.” He made a vague gesture toward the set of recent windows that contained Jon’s portrait.

“Why are you doing it this way? Why are you using people like this? The usual method of seeking the inner truth or whatever is by experimenting on yourself. Meditation, drugs, whatever.”

“I overheard that you’re studying science of some kind. Tell me, when the experimenter is the variable, what’s that experiment worth?”

“And do you brief all your test subjects before you start your experiment?”

He opened his mouth, hesitated. He looked away, and his pale cheeks flushed a little. “Sometimes I don’t get the chance,” he admitted.

“What does that mean? If you believe what you’re saying, then it’s incredibly irresponsible --”

“Sometimes people don’t want to talk. Just fuck.” His eyes returned to me, daring me to say something.

Suddenly my perspective snapped around. I’d seen him as using his perfect face to get what he wanted. Now it occurred to me that it might be a liability as well as a tool. I’d always been irritated by the assertion that one ought to feel sorry for beautiful people because others supposedly ignored their mental talents; it seemed to me that pretty folks got more credit for intelligence, not less. But it hadn’t crossed my mind until now that there were other ways beauty could be a burden.
For instance, the ease it brought, the power over people, could become addictive, until someone like Zachary might forget how not to use it. Might lose sight of the fact that he didn’t have to seduce anyone.

In that light, I made my decision.

“I’m going to do you a favor,” I told him.

“Are you.” His voice was dry.

“Yeah, I am. I’m going to pose for you, and I’m not going to try to sleep with you. It must have crossed your mind that the reason you haven’t succeeded at -- at whatever the hell you’re trying to do -- is because you always paint your lovers.”

“They’re not --”

“All right, people who love you, who you don’t give a good goddamn about. I’m saying maybe that’s your problem. Isn’t that why you approached me? Because you could tell I wouldn’t fall for your shit? So, yeah, I’ll do it, but only because you’re such a fucking brilliant painter. If you still want to paint me, that is. If it isn’t just a pickup line.”

Zachary’s face opened up into a world-illuminating smile. “Thank you.”

“No problem. Now about that cab.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

He had a nice sedan that wasn’t quite new, plain gray and a bit scratched up, its backseat deeply buried in compacted books and papers. On the way to my dorm, he said only one thing to me: “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at five. We can get some takeout before we start.”

“If you’re paying,” I said.


“Where the hell have you been?” Miranda said when I came in. She sounded genuinely angry, so I looked at the clock, expecting it to be very late. To my surprise, it was only nine. “You’ve been at Zacchary’s, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So after all that talk about how useless and annoying --”

“I was wrong. He’s not --”

“I knew it! You hypocrite!”

“Would you let me finish? What I was trying to say is that he’s not sane enough to have the motives everyone ascribes to him, Miranda. He is deeply, seriously nuts. If he didn’t have so much money, he’d have to be institutionalized. He probably will anyway before too long. That kind of thing is progressive.”

She was staring at me with her arms crossed. Her whole posture was tense; she was furious. “But you fucked him anyway.”

“I did not!” I threw my backpack in a corner. “God, Miranda, what is your problem with this guy? You want him, he’s yours! I’m not jumping your claim, not that you have one.”

“Yeah, but maybe I would’ve if you hadn’t come along with your -- oh, I’m a supergenius, you can’t have me -- now he’s going to chase you until he gets you, and you stand there telling me it’s no big deal?”

I’d been getting puffed up and ready to yell at her, because she was yelling at me, but now I didn’t yell. She looked too distressed. It wasn’t really me she was mad at. She was mad at herself for not being what Zachary wanted, and for wanting to be. My anger deflated; I flopped down on my bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you had it that bad. I thought it was just kind of a crush. Listen, here’s the deal. I told him I’d pose -- let me talk! -- but only because I saw the art. I couldn’t turn down the chance to be painted that well. I have no intention of dating him, or whatever it is you’re thinking. And I think you should forget about him. You’re not going to be the one who breaks through the shell, or finds the inner true sweet kind Zachary, because there isn’t one.”

“You were over there for like two hours and now you’re an expert.”

“Miranda, he’s nuts! I think if he wasn’t an artist he’d be a serial killer. Whatever everybody’s trying to get out of him, it isn’t there! I’m going to pose until the painting’s done, and then I’ll never talk to him again, because except for the art he basically is a waste of skin.”

She stared at me a while longer, but it wasn’t an angry stare anymore, just sulky.

“And I’m posing with my clothes on,” I added.

Miranda gave an explosive sigh and sat down hard on the edge of her bed. “God, I’m such a fucking moron.”

There had to be a correct response to that, but I didn’t know it. I hadn’t been part of enough female drama to know what I was supposed to say to a girlfriend with a bad crush when she hit the self-loathing stage. I did, however, know better than to try to be logical about it. Since everything I could think of was a logical refutation of something she’d said, I just kept my mouth shut.

After a while, Miranda said, “Can we pretend this conversation never happened?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tell Zachary I like him. That would completely blow my chances.”

“Sure. I don’t plan to talk to him any more than I have to anyway.”

Another pause. “So is it true about the windows?”

“The windows? They’ve got pictures on them, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Of real people.”

“Well, I saw Jon. I didn’t know anyone else.”

“How many are there?”

I rolled my eyes up, remembering. “About twenty, I think. Well, that would be eighteen, because there are two blank ones left.”

“That many broken hearts,” Miranda mused. “I hope he’s proud of himself.”

I didn’t think he was, but I didn’t want to say that. It was good that she was mad at him. She was exactly the sort of person who’d be hurt the worst by Zachary’s indifference.

And me? Was I so sure I’d be safe?

I told myself I was. Knowing how little he actually cared about people would immunize me.


That night, though, I dreamed torrid dreams of him -- biting, scratching, howling sex on the roof of the church, performed for an audience of furious spirits who tore their hair and wailed in impotent rage. In the dream, I enjoyed their despair.


He was waiting outside my dorm building at precisely five. Miranda was with me, and she embarrassed herself a little by trying to involve him in conversation. She complimented his car and began to talk about how she wished she had one, about how annoying it was to take the bus all the time; he nodded solemnly and unlocked the door for me.

As soon as I was inside, he said, “Goodbye, Miranda,” and drove away.

If it had been anyone else, I would have taken him to task for his rudeness. I didn’t think he’d meant any such thing, though. If anything, I suspected he thought himself assiduously polite for remembering her name.

“What sort of food would you like?” he asked me.

“It’s your treat, you get to pick. I have a cafeteria pass and a bus card, so my parents figure they don’t have to send me any extra money.”

“Did you expect me to pay for your taxi last night?”

“No, I was going to use my book money for that. Probably not smart, but it was fucking cold out. The bus stop is like a mile from your house.”

“Oh.”

We drove in silence to a Vietnamese restaurant on the east side, spoke only to order, and continued unspeaking to the church.

At night, it had seemed a forbidding and magical place; in the last of the daylight, it looked shabby. I could just make out that there was light inside. I later learned that he left the lights on twenty-four hours a day.

He’d cleared a place for me to pose. Not near the window he eventually intended to put me on, but in the middle of his living space. Books were piled high along the walls. He grubbed a sketchbook out of one of the piles, fished a pencil out of his pocket, and gave me an appraising look.

“I don’t know what to have you hold. Usually I learn people better before I begin to paint them.”

“There’s not that much to know about me,” I told him, not sure if I believed it. “What you see is what you get. Here --” I grabbed an empty mug off a book pile. “To get my hands in the right place. Does that work?”

Zachary shrugged. “We’ll see. Stand straight. Like that. If you start to get dizzy, bend your knees a little.” He looked from me to the page a few times, then gave me a wry smile. “Don’t you want to fix your hair?”

“Is something wrong with it?”

“No. But everyone always wants to look in a mirror first.”

I shook my head. “I know it has nothing to do with being pretty. Go ahead.”

The wryness went out of his smile; he looked pleasantly surprised. Then he bent over his page and started in.

At first, I looked at him while I stood still. He really was gorgeous. I would have thought that having permission to rest my eyes on that beauty would pass the time indefinitely. After a while, though, I surprised myself by being tired of watching him. When gazing at a pretty face, or any face I suppose, it’s the expressions that fascinate. The hints of thoughts crossing under the surface. Zachary didn’t have any of those. I amused myself by thinking that he was a robot, and then by thinking that he was a space alien like I’d accused him of being. Frankly, his face was no more interesting to stare at than a sculpture of a beautiful boy. It would be nice to have the sculpture around, maybe standing in the entryway so that one could greet it upon coming home, but it was still just scenery.

So I looked at other things. The windows, the paintings in them. The clutter. Titles of books. The books were largely the usual college-student crap, philosophy and famous literature and cheap genre-fiction paperbacks, but there were a few titles that were neither escapism nor coursework. Several occult books, heavily bookmarked and dogeared. A few of what looked to be rare old books, their leather spines ornately gilded, treated with no more respect than the horror paperbacks got. A book of prints by Pre-Raphaelite painters, thrown crumpled in a corner as if it had angered him.

I checked my watch twice. The first time, only half an hour had passed. The second time, it was quarter to ten. I’d zoned out, thinking about a thousand unrelated things, and felt as rested as if I’d slept. Zachary was still scribbling at a furious speed. He’d used at least a dozen pages of the sketchbook. I figured that if he didn’t have the pose down by now he wasn’t going to get it.

“Okay,” I said, and he jumped and flung his pencil over his shoulder. I laughed a little.

He glared at me. “Damn it,” he snapped, “don’t interrupt me!” He dived after his pencil.

“It’s time for me to go.”

He flung a hand out in an angry gesture without looking up. “Then go!”

“You’re driving me home, remember?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It was implied. Learn the rules, Zachary. You can’t coast on pretty with me. Drive me home, or I’m staying here. In which case you get the couch.”

He took a long breath and let it out slowly, the anger draining from his eyes until, when he spoke, it was in the coolly reasonable tone he usually used. “All right. I’m sorry. I’m frustrated. You’re going to have to come back again. The same time tomorrow, if that’s all right.”

I thought, then shook my head. “Thursday’s better.”

“Thursday then.” He looked at his sketchbook, then flung it down. “Come on.”

I posed Thursday. He still wasn’t satisfied, so I gave him most of my Saturday afternoon. I started to get a little annoyed with him when he wanted me there again the next day, and told him my Sundays were mine and accused him of dawdling. He stared me down. I shrugged and said Monday would be all right. This kept happening.

He filled an entire sketchbook with me and started another one. Quite near the beginning he set aside the final pose and wanted to sketch me doing normal things, so I didn’t bitch too much about the time he was taking, since I could study.
Once he even came to my dorm room and sketched me playing video games. Miranda got mad when he wouldn’t talk, and stormed out; she didn’t come back until three in the morning. I felt bad for her, but not too bad. It was better if she didn’t spend much time near Zachary. I felt terribly powerful for ignoring him the way I did, but he was starting to get to me. If he’d put down the sketchbook and come over to play my kung fu game with me, and if he’d laughed when my character beat up his, and if he’d told me a story about dumb games he’d liked as a child, he could have had anything he wanted from me. The only reason I was safe was that he was too nuts to counterfeit normality that way.

He didn’t seem to realize that all normality is counterfeit. My own certainly was. It was too easy to fall into his habit of silence, speaking only to convey information or request it, to sit so still and to look at nothing.

We never talked. Not about things, anyway. It was a work relationship. The closest we came to a real conversation was a discussion of our schedules, or of what exactly the hell was wrong with his sketches that he had to keep doing them. Even with that last one, he only explained that he didn’t know me well enough yet. That the sketches were no better than photographs, capturing only the surface.

I told him again that there was nothing else to see. By that time, though, I no longer came close to believing it myself. I knew there was something going on with me that even I didn’t know about. I just caught glimpses of it from time to time, saw its wake on the surface and deduced that something was moving in the depths.

There were the dreams. What concerned me wasn’t that they were erotic dreams; naturally my subconscious would experiment with what it would be like with such a pretty boy. What concerned me was that the me in these dreams, the point of view, was not the person I thought of as myself. My attitude, my feelings, my thoughts, were all someone else’s. Someone who reveled in pain and destruction. These dreams were full of bitter joy that I could never experience in waking life. In real life, I winced when I saw roadkill; in the dreams, I buried my arms to the elbows in Zachary’s guts and was turned on by his screaming.

It disturbed me, but not as much as it should have.

Then there was the more subtle and pervasive change in me: that, though I was vaguely aware that it was pretty weird for Zachary to follow me around with his sketchbook so that he could paint my soul for some magical spell, I didn’t much care anymore. I was beginning to accept his reasons for doing it and no longer bothered to think of his occultism as crazy thought. When I remembered about how he’d drawn the gossips without looking, it no longer bothered me. It just seemed like a Zacchary thing to do.

Sometimes I even thought about going back on my word and trying to get into his pants after all. I imagined throwing his damned sketchbook off the balcony and pinning him down on his cluttered floor. I thought that what stopped me was the awareness of how many people had already been there, but looking back I believe that I was alarmed by the violence of these fantasies. There was never any tenderness in them. What I wanted to do to him was something like rape.
There was pride as well. I was something special to him the way I was now, inaccessible, unknowable. If I ever touched him I’d lose that status.

From time to time I wondered if I had become him.

Winter came. Zachary was still sketching me, but I had given up all pretense of posing. Miranda was avoiding me. Sometimes I saw Jon, but he’d gotten to be a bit of a downer. I hadn’t made any other friends.

One night in mid-week, I was in the Mojo, working on calculus. Zachary was drawing me. I’d grumbled at him for sitting at my table and distracting me, so he was sitting one table away, and I’d mostly forgotten he was there. Outside, the sky looked pink with reflected city lights, and snow was falling thickly.

Distracted by the snow, I kept losing my train of thought. Finally I gave up. I just stared out at the snow. Watched the cars slip and fishtail in the slush. I wondered whether I should learn to draw; I would have liked to paint those cars, in that weird light, throwing up dirty plumes of water onto the whitening sidewalks. I would have liked to paint the telephone wires crossing between buildings against the salmon sky. It reminded me that I’d used to write poetry, before starting college. Some of it had been all right.

Flipping past my math notes, I found a blank page in my notebook. The blankness of it intimidated me. I went back to the page I’d been working from. There, in the margin, I began to write. Just random words, at first. Cars. Frustrated cars, engines shoving and huffing, wheels spinning, everything slipping...

Everything slipping sideways on casters, perspective lost and time rotated, not slower or faster but different, more deliberate, frustrated cars shoving through wet snow under a salmon sky.

Quietly, from his next-table-over exile, I heard Zachary whisper: “Yes.”

I looked at him sharply. He met my eyes and smiled.

“Got what you wanted?” I asked him. “I suppose you’ll be leaving now.”

“No. I just finally got started.”

I shrugged, and went back to calculus. Time continued to slip sideways.

“Cyn?”

Slowly dragging myself out of my notes, I found Jon hovering near my table, waiting for permission to join me. He was alone, and he looked terrible.

“What’s up?” I pulled a chair out for him.

He slumped into it. His eyes and cheeks were sunken, his skin pasty, his fingernails chewed to bleeding. He had a defeated look about him. Not as if something had happened just now, but as if he were being slowly eaten from the inside and it was just beginning to show. He was sitting with his back to Zachary, as if he hadn’t seen him, and Zachary was watching Jon’s hunched back with great scientific interest. Checking the progress of his experiment?

“Jon,” I prompted, “What’s wrong?”

He shrugged, sighed. “Same old. No biggie. How are you?”

“Same old what? You look like you’ve got an intestinal parasite.”

Jon laughed a little. “Trust you to put it like that. More like a heartworm. I thought maybe since you’re his friend...”

“You mean him?” I pointed.

Jon turned around, and his face went gray. “Oh God.” He stood up, swaying. “Zachary.”

“Jonathan.” Zachary nodded coldly.

“Zachary, I have to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

“In private.”

“No.”

“I’ll go,” I offered. There wasn’t much of anyone else in the cafe.

Jon put his hand on my arm. “You can stay, Cyn. It’s all right. I was going to dump all this on you since I couldn’t find him, so you might as well hear it.” He turned to Zachary. “I know better than to ask if you ever think about me.”

Zachary didn’t say anything. He didn’t even set down his pencil, but held it ready as if waiting for the interruption to end.

“I still think about you,” Jon continued. “Constantly. I can’t think about anything else. It’s -- it’s horrible, Zachary, I’m obsessed and I hate being that kind of person, but I swear I’ve tried to let it go and I can’t. It’s been more than a year. I should be over you. But it’s getting worse. It just keeps getting worse.” His voice broke.

I reached for his hand. “Jon...”

“No! He has to hear this. He has to know what he does to people. You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you? I don’t know how, but you’re killing me. You stole something out of me. Something I need to live.”

Zachary gave a weary sigh. “Stole it? You gave it to me, you ridiculous creature. I didn’t even ask for it.”

“Wait.” I closed my book. “Wait a second. What are you talking about?”

They ignored me.

Jon’s voice was creaky with impending tears. “It isn’t right. Zachary. It’s not right. I’m going insane. I can’t think of one single thing besides you. Every single dream I have is about you. Every one. That’s not normal. It hurts. I can’t stand it! You have to get rid of it! You have to stop doing this to me!”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can! You know you can.”

“I won’t, though.” Zachary stood up and started putting on his coat.

Jon bent his head. Closed his eyes. Tears ran down his face and beaded under his chin. Suddenly he raised his head and glared at Zachary with a look somewhere between fear and anger. “If you don’t I’ll have to kill myself.” The way he said it, it wasn’t a teen-angst manipulation tactic, it was the plain truth.

I opened my mouth to try to derail this train before it went any further out of control. Zachary rode me down:

“I’d prefer it if you killed yourself, actually.”

And Jon nodded bleakly, as if this was what he’d expected.

Outrage jerked me out of my chair and across the small space to where Zachary stood. I punched him in the face.

I felt something pop in my hand, and Zachary went sprawling, stumbling back into his table, knocking it aside and his chair over as he went clumsily to the floor, emitting a shocked yelp. That I’d hit him surprised me as well. I’d never had occasion to punch anyone before. It felt good. It felt really good.

The few patrons in the cafe went quiet, staring. Zachary sat on the floor, looking up at me with an expression of total incomprehension. Had no one ever been mad at him before? Spoiled rotten child. He deserved far worse than a knock upside the head for what he’d said to Jon.

“Parasite,” I spat. “You do what Jon told you to, or I’ll come to your house and kick your ass right through one of your pretty windows. Fucking robot. He’s worth ten of you. A hundred. You do what he wanted, and you do it tonight, and then you work on staying far away from me, because if I ever see your face again I’ll wreck it.” I snatched up my books and put my arm around Jon. “Come on. You’re coming to my place.”

Jon was staring helplessly at Zachary, still silently crying, but when I gave him a little shove he didn’t resist. Zachary was dabbing at his lips as we passed, feeling the blood beginning to ooze. But his other hand was groping for his lost pencil.

And his expression was one of triumph.

Jon and I walked together across campus through the hush of falling snow, hand in hand like small children. He was holding the hand I’d hit Zachary with, which was starting to hurt, but I didn’t want to let go for even a second; I felt like I was holding him back from a cliff. I didn’t mind a little pain, because at that moment Jon felt like a baby brother I had to protect. I didn’t know him that well, but I didn’t suppose I had to; he needed someone, and I was there.He’d stopped crying a while after we’d left the cafe, and now he just looked numb. I was helpless. Shouldn’t there be a rule for this? Should I call his parents, a suicide help line, a mental hospital? What if that just made him feel betrayed, and pushed him over the edge?

What was it Jon had been telling Zachary to do? What was it Zachary had supposedly stolen? Somehow I was certain that it was nothing tangible, no physical object. It was something he’d been trying to get from me all this time and failing.
That look of triumph as I’d left... had he gotten it?

Memory flung a phrase at me: Magicians able to separate or harm or control the shadows of others. The power of images.
The painting of Jon, with the dead bird in his hands. It had been the best of them.

I stopped, turned Jon to look at me. He had that same expression now. His eyeliner was smeared, his face grayish-pale, and his eyes full of that same childlike anguish: Make it not be like this.

“It’ll be all right, Jon,” I promised. “Just hang on a little longer.”

“I’m fine,” he said with a wan smile. “I should go home now.”

“No. I don’t think you should be alone tonight.”

When Miranda saw us come through the dorm room door, she sprang up right away, rushing to Jon with her hands out. “Shit, Jon, what happened to you?”

He shrugged. “Saw Zachary. Cyn hit him.”

“She what?” She turned to me, aghast. “You did not.”

I showed her my swelling knuckle. “Yep.”

“Jesus Christ.” She grabbed the hand, making me wince. “Why?”

“He said something unforgivable to Jon. Can we impose on your private stash, Miranda? I think Jon really needs to get legless.”

She raised an eyebrow at me, but a glance at Jon’s tear-streaked face convinced her. She went to our tiny fridge, rooted in the freezer behind the microwave mini-pizzas, and produced a bottle of vodka. “No glasses, I’m afraid.”

“I think,” said Jon slowly, “that this is a swigging-from-the-bottle kind of occasion.”

She opened it and handed it to him. He took a drink and gasped, then took another. “Share,” I suggested, trying to flex my hand. “I need anesthetic.”

The bottle went around a few times, with Miranda trying to make conversation and me and Jon not helping. When I felt the tip of my nose go numb, I judged myself sufficiently inebriated to try fixing my hand. I grasped the finger and tugged hard. Not hard enough. The pain made me gasp, made my eyes water. Miranda said, “What the hell are you doing, Cyn?”

“Dislocated,” I explained. I took a deep breath and a better grip and tried again. This time the pain peaked higher, but my knuckle righted itself with a nasty little click. “Ah, ow,” I said, looking at it. Pink and swelled, but fixed. “Ow.”

“Ew!” Miranda looked at me with distaste. “You’re cold, Cyn.”

“You’re not the first person to say that.”

We passed the bottle around until it was empty. Miranda and I conspired to get Jon to drink most of it, and around two in the morning he rewarded us by passing out on my bed. I wrapped him in my blanket, and in my arms.

Miranda, too drunk to be any use, laughed at me. “You’re shit outta luck, Cyn. He’s gay as a hand grenade.”

“It’s not that,” I said. I was pretty damn drunk myself, so I couldn’t explain any further. I just felt he needed it.

And maybe if he hadn’t been too drunk to notice, it might have helped.


When I woke, hung over and thirsty, he was gone. Groaning, I disentangled myself from the blanket that had been carefully tucked around me. My alarm clock said it was 9:56. Far too early to be up after a vodka binge.

My book bag had been emptied in a tidy pile beside the bed. I got up to look at it, and saw my notebook sitting out on the desk, one of my pens beside it. The page had writing on it that wasn’t mine; Jon had left us a note.

Please, I prayed as I picked it up, please let it just say: thanks, and call me. Even: go to hell, you interfering bitch. But I knew in my churning stomach what it was.

Dear Cyn and Miranda,
You are true friends. You did your very best and if things were normal it would have saved me but there’s nothing anyone could have done. Please please please don’t blame yourselves. Pretend it was an accident. Just one of those stupid things. I’m so very sorry but I just can’t stand this anymore.
Love,
Jon.
PS: Please send someone to the river by the bridge to get me. Do not go yourselves. I am hurting you too much already without that.

A great hollowness opened in me where my anger should have been. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right, and I could tell that it should have made me furious. It didn't. Only helpless.

My whimpering woke Miranda. She had to pry my fingers off the notebook. Then we cried together, like sisters whose house had burned down.

Neither of us had been that close with Jon. We would not have expected the grief to be so strong. We wouldn’t have expected the guilt to hit us so hard. Miranda was the one who made the call; I couldn’t speak a single word without breaking down again. I wanted so badly to grab Jon and shake him and slap him and cuddle him and explain at length why he couldn’t possibly do this to us, and the fact that I couldn’t kept hitting me in the face.

Eventually the police came and got the note, and I didn’t care that they took the whole notebook with my calculus in it. They told us that Jon had drowned himself in water a foot and a half deep; he’d apparently lain down in it and let hypothermia paralyze him so that he went under. They’d had to chip ice away to get the body out.

When they were gone, Miranda came over and sat on my bed with me, leaning on me. “We did what we could,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“I know,” I whispered back. “I just keep seeing...” Jon lying down in the icy river, with the snow falling on his face, forcing himself to stay despite wracking shivers... and then the shivers would have stopped, and he would have felt warm...
He had made absolutely sure that no one could think his suicide had been a cry for help, an attempt not meant to succeed. He could have changed his mind at any point in the ten or fifteen minutes it must have taken him to die. He’d been right by the shore; even half-conscious, he could have crawled out. But he hadn’t been found on the shore trying to reach warmth. He hadn’t changed his mind.

What had given him the force of will to stay in the water, knowing it was killing him? What had he been trying to escape, that was worse than that death?

“Zachary,” I said out loud. “Zachary did this to him.”

Miranda sounded skeptical. “Cyn...”

“Last night, what he said that made me hit him... he told Jon to kill himself.”

“Fuck.” She considered, then said it with more force. “Fuck. That bastard! That fucker! We should tell the cops, so Jon’s parents can sue him for everything he’s got.”

I tried to share her outrage, but all I felt was a weak, wilting sorrow. “That won’t bring Jon back,” I said, then grimaced at the triteness of it.

Miranda rocked me. “I know, honey, I know.”

“I’m sorry. I have to go out.”

“Where?” She sounded doubtful.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just have to be alone.”

“I understand,” she said, and the thought that went through my head at this was: No, you don’t, because no one understands anyone.


For hours I walked through the deepening snow. My thoughts went in circles for a while, then gradually trailed down until they went silent. Relieved of the need to think, I followed my numbness along slick sidewalks, past people shoveling, children screeching in schoolyards, cars stuck in driveways. I realized my poem about the cars was gone, taken by the police with Jon’s note, but it didn’t matter.

Sometime in the afternoon, I found myself in Zachary’s neighborhood.

I must have been going there all along. It was too far from the University for me to have reached it by chance. Maybe seven or eight miles.

Fine. I’d be the one to tell him. When Zachary inevitably reacted with indifference, maybe my anger would surface at last, and I’d hurt him the way he deserved to be hurt. For what he’d done to Jon, for what he must have done to the girl who’d written the letters he’d been destroying when I met him, and everyone else on those windows of his. Those damned beautiful horrible paintings.

His street was lit by strobing lights in red and blue. There were four cop cars and an ambulance parked outside the church.

The ambulance pulled out as I approached, drove past me at a sedate pace, with its flashers off. The cop cars continued to strobe silently. There was yellow tape strung across the church’s whole front yard, and the snow inside the tape was well-trampled, as if every inch of it had been walked over. There were cops talking beside their cars. There were neighbors standing around, hunched in their coats, murmuring to each other; only a handful of these. I joined them, and asked what had happened.

A middle-aged black man in a Chicago Cubs cap told me: “You know that weird kid that lived here? He was murdered.”
I swayed. “Murdered.”

“Yep. Some crazy. He had a lot of freaky people coming in and out of there. Old lady next door heard screaming and called the cops.”

In my head, I heard those screams. I’d heard them before; I’d dreamed them. I managed to produce one syllable:

“How?”

The man gave half a laugh. “I dunno, but they just spent the last two, three hours looking for the guy’s heart. Guess the killer took a souvenir.”

“Did you see him?”

“Saw a body bag.” He looked at me more closely. “You a friend of his?”

I shook my head slowly. “Not really.”

Gradually, the spectators wandered off, until only I was left. I was thinking. Thinking about Jon, and the timing of the whole thing. Thinking about my dreams, the dreams of tearing Zachary apart with teeth and nails.

At last a woman in a suit came out of the church, followed by some people in coveralls carrying various types of equipment. A camera, and some mysterious boxes. There were red smears on one technician’s knees.

As the woman went to one of the police cars, I approached her. She stopped to look at me. She looked tired, older than she probably was. “It’ll be in the paper,” she told me.

“Are you a detective?” I asked. “I think you should know... did you hear about a young man who drowned himself in the river this morning?”

“Hadn’t heard,” she said blandly.

All the cops were listening to this exchange. One said, “Yeah. Over by the University bridge. What about it?”

“He was Zachary’s ex-boyfriend. Um. Also. If you find, if your, um, forensic people found a bruise on Zachary’s face, that was from me, not the killer.” I pulled off my glove to show the detective my swelled knuckle.

Now she looked interested. “So you know the guy.”

I didn’t know why I was even bothering with this, except that I knew they’d find out sooner or later. “Yeah. I’d been posing for one of his paintings, but...”

“Hey, that’s you!” This was one of the forensic technicians, the guy with the camera. “I thought you looked familiar. You’re in that creepy picture, the one that’s still wet.”

“Me?” I said stupidly. “I didn’t know he’d actually done the painting.”

The detective waved away this trivia. “Somebody get her statement. I need to go figure out how the hell --” She stopped, with a look at me, as if she’d about to say something that was not suitable for delicate non-cop ears. “Fax it to me as soon as you can. Ellers, you do it.”

“Ma’am.” The cop who’d heard about Jon’s suicide motioned me into one of the cars.

My statement didn’t take long. I mentioned that Zachary had a habit of using people and discarding them, but that was the only subjective commentary I offered. Other than that I kept it simple. The cop named Ellers got my address and phone number and dropped me at the bus stop.


I stood waiting for the bus as day faded. I kept waiting even as busses came and slowed and rolled past without stopping because I didn’t come out of the shelter. It was as if I was waiting for a different kind of bus than the ones that were coming. The last of the overcast day was the color of Zachary’s eyes. The color of a drowned boy’s lips.

I left the bus shelter and started back toward the church.

The lights were on inside. No one had bothered to turn them off. I thought about the residents of the neighborhood looking out of their windows and seeing the angels all lit up, and knowing that the boy who’d painted them was dead. I felt truly sorry for them, because it was not their story, just the ragged edges of someone else’s being shoved into their world.
There was sticky yellow tape across the door, but it wasn’t locked. Maybe the police couldn’t find the keys. I broke the tape and went in.

There was a smell in here. A sewage smell, mixed with old meat. It was cold, maybe a little colder than it should have been even with cops going in and out all afternoon.

I don’t know what I expected to see, but nothing looked different. It looked too much the same, that place, and that bothered me. The place where someone had been murdered should have been more obviously changed. There was the big empty space, there were the angels looking down...

There was a big fat spatter of blood on the floor right in front of my feet.

Once I’d seen it, the rest came clear. There was blood splashed all the way out to the middle of the lower floor, spatters halfway to the ceiling on the wall near the stairs. I had to walk very carefully to avoid stepping on any.

When I reached the loft, vomit rose in my throat and I had to choke it down to keep from leaving a present for the cops if they came back. The spot where Zachary had died was a lake of half-dried blood. His books were soaked in it. And it looked... chunky. I remembered about the heart being missing. I couldn’t imagine Jon ripping someone’s heart out. I couldn’t imagine Jon even slapping anyone.

The police would never believe it, but I was sure that Zachary’s experiment had killed him.

I had to edge along by the railing to get past the blood puddle without tracking in it. On the other side there were footprints, leading away toward the altar end of the church; the end where there were no stairs, no way down from the balcony. There were also fat drips and spatters, following the footprints’ path. I followed them as well.

The sight of Zachary’s futon with the killer’s footprints and splotches of his blood tracked across it made my heart constrict painfully. For the first time since I’d heard he was dead, I felt pity for him. The poor, cruel, lonely boy.

The blood trail led to a puddle under the farthest window. That was also where the chill was coming from. There were two holes broken in the glass, with streaks running down from the shattered edges, and a vaguely human-shaped smear below. Blood painted the window all the way down.

The last window is for me, he’d said.

So it had been. The killer must have put Zachary’s arms through the window and hung him there. But who else had he said that to besides me?

Cold claws danced up my neck, across my scalp. I turned, slowly, to look at the thing I’d come to see and then avoided seeing until now: the second-to-last window.

My own image stared down at me, larger than life. Its eyes flared in rage; its hair was flying and full of fire; it was clothed in what looked like blood-spotted paper wrapped onto its body with spiraling chains; blood ran from its mouth, streaked its legs, speckled its white wings.

Its arms were bloody to the elbows. In its hands it cupped a torn and battered human heart.

My skin was prickling with adrenaline. I wanted to run. The only thing that stopped me was the certainty that it would somehow get me if I did. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the stepladder, leaning against the wall where Zachary had put it when he’d finished the picture. Without taking my eyes from the window, I edged over to it and grabbed it. It took both hands. It was heavy. I had to get my shoulder under it to bring it over to the painting of me, the evil angel Zachary had somehow drawn out of me.

It was the rage he’d seen when I’d struck him that had made him smile in triumph. He’d made his magic out of my anger. The idiot. I braced my feet wide apart and lifted the stepladder like a battering ram.

The painting’s surface rippled. Its eyes focused on me. A drop of painted blood fell from its fingers and hit the windowsill with a tiny sound.

With a yell, I heaved the ladder through the window.

In the sound of breaking glass, there may have been a scream besides my own. Shards exploded in all directions; they stung my face and arms, caught in my clothing. The ladder hit the snow with a thump, and glass pattered down all around it. It took a long time to fall. Then came silence. I stood there in that quiet, feeling the cold night flowing in, shaking with reaction.

And then, in a rush, all my anger returned to me. It punched me in the stomach, jerked my lungs, hauled a screech of rage out of me, made my fingernails cut into my palms. My shaking intensified until I thought I might fall over. Fury washed through me in hot waves; for Jon, for Miranda, for these nameless angels, for Zachary, for myself.

At long last, the anger faded, leaving me only tired. A warm tickle on my face told me I needed a band-aid. My gut told me I needed food. My aching heart told me I needed to be alone for a long, long time. I turned away from the place where Zachary had evoked my shadow, and I went home.


The police had me in for questioning three times. They told me Jon couldn’t have done it because Zachary had been killed at around ten in the morning, after Jon was already dead. I was their next best suspect, but I’d been in my room to give the cops Jon’s suicide note at eleven, which didn’t give me time to do the murder, clean up, and get back, and Miranda vouched that I’d been with her all along anyway.

It was during this questioning that I learned that two of his female models had comitted suicide as well over the past two years, and that the only male besides Jon, the green-eyed angel with the broken glass, was in federal lockup for the murder of his parents. The detective didn’t come across as too enthusiastic about solving the case. Since Zachary had apparently alienated his family a long time ago, no one was pushing it very hard. The unspoken consensus was that he’d brought it on himself.

I never told anyone what I suspected, of course. But I haven’t forgotten that the murder occurred at ten o’clock, the same time that I found Jon’s note. I have never forgotten the sensation of looking into my own face, and seeing pure merciless rage there. I refuse to take responsibility; Zachary forged the weapon that killed him, and he did it not caring who was hurt in the process. Nevertheless, in a way, I was the one who murdered him, and it isn’t nice to know that sort of thing about myself. I think I’ve swallowed down that bloody angel, I don’t think anyone has anything to fear from her. But I know now that she’s there.

When it came time to choose my major, I decided on abnormal psychology. I got my bachelor’s and left college. I studied parapsychology on the side. I haven’t made a career of it; you can’t, really, no matter what the movies say. After graduation I took an office job. I live quietly. I live alone.

Yesterday, I went to look at the church again. The for-sale sign is weathered, tilted, buried in hip-deep weeds. There’s garbage in the yard. There’s a faded bit of yellow paper stapled to the door, certifying it vacant.

There’s plywood where the windows were.

I’m thinking of buying it.