Chapter 21 #2
‘I spent a few years dying. It was constant. Every second, I was back on the ground, the world collapsed over me. My ribs were broken into. I was not a man. I was a tearing thing. There is nothing poetic about it, dad. Rape. There’s really nothing that I can say to make it easier for you to hear.
It is nothing, for periods of time. It all goes dark, you die, for a minute or two.
Emptiness, and then you’ve been turned over.
It’s nothing really. I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to know this.
The details. I’m not supposed to talk about those.
Not supposed to explain it. Please don’t be mad at me.
For telling you and for living it. I was just going home. ’
‘Maybe I didn’t want to come back. If the pain would end, then I’d be happy to die.
I’m sorry, dad. You wouldn’t want me to die like that.
I’m sorry for telling you. I’ll stop soon.
Soon, I won’t bring it up again. It hurts.
It’s embarrassing to say where it hurts.
I won’t. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.
We don’t talk about that. The burn. It’s a burning sort of feeling.
A lot of what isn’t fire burns. There are burns worse than what fire can do to you.
At times, I think there is somewhere worse than Hell.
There are people worse than the devil. And they are here, dad. They are here with us.’
Michael said, “It’s not time for him to die. I won’t hurt him.”
“Shut up,” said Joana. “If you’re here, the end is coming.
” But she really couldn’t bring herself to get up, to move away from the prince she’d spent so long dreaming would come back to save her like he had on that night.
‘After I stopped screaming, my gaze flashed back to the piles of limbs and bones and blood— then I jerked forward with a retching. I vomited between us, but you took my shoulders, held me back, held me.’ Michael didn’t tell her, then, why he had been there.
It was only some other night that he said he’d come to find the anti-Christ on God’s orders, a Beast that had been born from a resurrected body the year prior.
‘God sent you, a year too late for Tadeo. God is always sending you to find what can’t be found. ’
Tadeo thought: ‘One day, I returned to town. I don’t know why.
I spent a year and forty days, forty nights, waiting, but the devil never appeared for me as he had for Jesus.
And so I returned, and when I did, I told them that the child they loved had died.
I was someone new. That would be easier to explain.
I didn’t want to tell them what I’d done to my body, so I would say God did it to me. ’
Michael said: “The prophecy must happen in order. I can’t kill him yet—” He paused, then teased rather nervously: “I thought I told you this.”
Joana scoffed at that. “I was, what, a kid? Sorry for not remembering how your apocalypse works.”
“I forgive you,” Michael teased again, and Joana huffed and finally began wrestling out of his touch to sit down.
Unbelieving, Tadeo’s family had first ordered him to leave their house.
They called him a demon, dressed in the pulled skin of their missing child.
Nahual, his grandfather called him. And even after they’d accepted Tadeo, he remained in hiding, in the shadows, refusing to leave.
He feared his body. He feared everything.
‘They asked me: Did you see Heaven as you lay dead? I told them that I couldn’t remember because I was too scared to say that all I ever saw was blood. ’
Joana crossed her arms and leaned back on the bench, shutting her eyes, as if that would be enough to will away the pounds in her head and the spinning of the park around her.
“Why did you bring me here? You should have brought me home.” After they’d met, Michael had asked where her parents were, and he had flown her there.
‘When my mother saw me, she screamed at my father. My father said they’d threatened to hurt the entire family if he didn’t hand over a daughter.
He cried to my mother, apologizing. He cried to me, too. ’
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “You never liked it when I took you home when you were younger.”
Chuckling, Joana decided to ask, “You know, I always wondered why you came back for me.” ‘Why you listened to my prayers.’
Michael readjusting, appearing almost sheepish.
“I hadn’t meant to,” he answered honestly.
“I’m not supposed to step in to save humans, especially not from each other, not often.
But when I can, when only the victim will know, I try to save.
On another day that I was looking for Tadeo — I saw you crying in this park. ”
“I wasn’t crying,” Joana grumbled.
“You were.” Michael hesitated again, then he said, “You told me that your father had become involved with bad men and that was why he tried to sell you.” Furrowing her brow, Joana tried not to feel any shame for having spilled her misery to the ghost that’d reappeared to her that day; she’d been so young, after all. “You said it wasn’t his fault.”
Joana sighed. “I had no one else to talk to.”
Michael could relate to that, couldn’t he? Swallowing, the prince replied, “I regret it often, having told you so much. Forgive me.”
For some time, she hadn’t even known he was an angel.
She sought him out some nights, always found Michael in the parks, sometimes ran to him with two corns on sticks, and they’d eat together before Joana spoke to the chief prince rather casually.
‘You must’ve loved it. To me, you weren’t some divine creature that was supposed to hold up the sky.
I wasn’t scared of you anymore, and I didn’t pray to you.
Why would I be scared of you? Any man on the street was much scarier than a ghost. That’s what I was sure you were — a ghost.’
Joana said, “I don’t know if I can.”
She could still remember that day they’d been sitting on a bench and the prince began to tell her of the end times.
‘I stared at you with big eyes, I asked what you meant, and you told me about an anti-Christ and a Beast. You would kill them one day, but until then, the false messiah will create suffering for all of the Earth. You spoke to me of God’s promise to rise us good people to Heaven.
Whenever I complained about the horrible things that happened in my home, in my town, in my own heart, you reassured me that all would be better in Heaven. I used to want that.’
Tadeo, eventually, decided to rest, carrying the angel Dina down with him and setting up the tent, and leaving water for the mare.
Once he settled down, he realized how raw his face felt with all the crying he’d done as he rode along.
The misery, now, was putting him to sleep.
And, in his dreams, Tadeo remembered the days he’d started petty theft for food, for drinks.
No one was capable of stopping him, and he almost prayed that they’d try it.
He would chuckle to himself, imagining soldiers being directed toward him and how they’d be torn apart in his claws.
“Every time,” Joana began, “that you left me, I went back home and the apocalypse shit just didn’t matter anymore.
” Though she swore, it was detached, not angry or even upset.
“I went back to a family that needed money with a father who’d traded all his freedom for a gun and the salary of a criminal.
I realized that you were asking me to let all of the world collapse for Heaven.
How could you ask that of me? Fuck you. Fuck you.
” Again, it was distant, like she was reciting a script with no emotion, like she’d planned to say this once but had forgotten why.
“I wanted to save my family. I wanted to save my town.” ‘But I was only thirteen or so when I decided.’ Three years of Michael in her life.
‘I didn’t understand how the world worked. ’
“I never should have told you.”
“I would have found Tadeo, even if you hadn’t told me about him or what he was capable of.
” Joana answered; she doubted that, but the thought might make the both of them feel better.
“When I told you I never wanted to see you again, if you were going to let the world end, I meant it.” She chuckled.
“But, hey, maybe you were right in the end. Look at how bad everything’s gotten.
It’s all so fucked. I fucked up. I failed.
Are you happy?” The sun was beginning to rise, to drown them in light.
“No, Joana. I don’t— I don’t understand what you’ve done.”
Just some hours of sleep, then Tadeo was finally riding back to town at dawn.
He was careful to keep off the main roads, passing through the quiet streets, even quieter recently due to the gasoline shortage.
It was good since the exhaustion was wearing on Tadeo and his horse, though not enough to prevent Tadeo from perking up when Dina shifted and said, “Oh, Tadeo, there’s a crying woman over there.
” So lost in his fatigue, the anti-Christ hadn’t noticed, but he yanked on his mare to encourage her to stop, then he turned his head.
As the angel had said, there was a woman sobbing, but she was by a man slumped over the ground.
“He’s bleeding.” From both legs, gashes so deep that there were glimmers of white bone in between the flooding red at his thighs.