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Niall said it, and the holy Benedict of Nursia, who had put Niall in the beehive hut in the first place, and Xas had said it himself, in his black garden in the depths of hell: labor cleanses when it does not outright forgive. And so. And so this, the stink of asphalt and the hum of drills. The foreman wore a Yankees hat at an angle not conducive to it staying on and ignored Xas when he shouted at everyone else. He paid under the table and Xas had endeared himself by not correcting the wadded bills when they came. The crew was on the younger side, spindly and fretful when they were not brick-mortared out of muscle, and fascinating, in the same way every anonymous and dull mortal was fascinating. They all had terrible tattoos. They all fought silently and without realizing it to pair with Xas when heavy objects needed lifting. They all called him Zap, for some reason.
So it was as Zap, in a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket over a battered winter coat, that he saw the wallet left under the trestle by a passing crowd. He had to bend his back over the railing to get it. Daniel watched him. Daniel was squirrelly and young enough that the old case of picking pox blended in with the acne scars. Both would fade, but he had the habit, still, of eyeing, which he did not bother to cover. “Anything good?”
Xas showed him the empty bill pocket.
Daniel laughed, to excuse himself. “There’s a police station up by the McDonalds, you want to drop that off.”
“I know this person,” Xas said. He snapped the wallet shut. Stuck it in his jeans pocket. “I’ll find him.”
“You know him?” Daniel whistled; he had one broken tooth up front, so he sounded like the scream of the Apocalypse. “Small world.”
“Smaller than you’d expect.”
Daniel cocked his head.
Daniel had tendrils coming out of him that flowed into any space where there might be love. In another life, Xas would harvest daffodils from the unkempt garden behind his mother’s old house. Xas would hover in the space between the rusted lawn chairs and the single sour cherry tree and listen to him talk, about the mother who’d thrown him out leaving the house in the will, about the deep hollow in his chest he’d once filled with anything he could smoke or shoot and was now trying to tamp down with yoga and cigarettes and isolation, about the moon and the planets and the thousand-dollar telescope he wanted to buy someday, one day a year. In another life. Right now his soft eyes felt sick as a dead cow’s. Xas ignored him, and after a few moments Daniel heard the ignore and said “All right,” puzzled but not quite hurt.
Time is a monster of imprecision. The cards in the wallet burned against his skin. The name, again and again, credit card, gym membership, library, in black plastic font. The face on the drivers’ license. It comes in the mouth, of course, does memory. It was an eternity of a workday, and backbreaking, and during its course Zap disappeared. The saliva pooling under Xas’ tongue tasted of a certain wine.
//
The university stamped the names of buildings on the access cards. The RA took the wallet and said she’d send an email. The handsome man at the desk had something wrong with his eyes, with his skin; both too pearly, and he was dusty, and he was wearing a hard hat, for some reason. She kept waiting but he wouldn’t leave. She said “Excuse me” and went into the back office, but she kept looking over the top of the computer and he was still there, motionless.
“I’ve contacted him,” she said, twenty minutes later, coming back to the front desk. “You can leave now.”
“Will he be here soon?”
“You can leave now,” she said, and tapped her fingers on the desk. “Sir, you need to leave now.”
He left. She went into the back office and sat down. She wrote the email, hesitated, added a sentence before sending it. She wrote a note for the security guard, scrawled the time on it, stuck it to the computer.
Xas, in the foyer of the dorm, insensible, memorized the row of metal mailboxes, and touched one finger to 223A. The inhabitant had written S and J in Sharpie on half an index card and taped it over another, older piece of index card. The rain and the snow and the general unpleasantness had come in and the red lines on the card had run together with the black ink to produce a pleasant deep red. Claret.
“Sir,” the RA said, coming into the foyer, and Xas heard her worry but did not register it. He walked into the snow anyways. Wine in his mouth. Song in his heart.
//
The college had, in decades past, planted twin rows of ornamental sour cherry trees to guard the path to the dorms. They cast long shadows on the salted ice from under the glare of halogens. The climate here was too miserable in winter to coax more than a few sour fruits from the flowers, but they drew rats anyways. The grass just at the side of the path was a graveyard of underdeveloped stones, fossilized by mud and successive layers of frost. At three in the morning the quad was empty, save for a figure picking its way across the lawn.
Save for another, watching. Coming after it.
The shadows collided.
“Are you following me?”
There he is.
“You’re following me.”
The light. Stand in the light. Let him see.
“Sobran,” Xas said. He came into the light from under the statue of Athena that replaced the sixth tree on the right side.
Sobran Jodeau, eighteen, indistinguishable from his fresh and miserable self on a summer evening in 1808, held up both hands, palms flat. He was half-drunk, not from dispiritedness and cherry wine but from hops and the general unpleasantness of cold.
“I found your wallet,” Xas said. “I found you.”
“I do not know who you are,” Sobran said. He said it very carefully, drawing over each syllable. The straight line of his vowels, the clipped curl of the r, they betrayed not a speck of French. “You have me mistaken for someone else.”
“It’s me.”
If pressed he would admit to being unsure what the Sobran of his imaginings would have done with that proclamation. The Sobran in between the dead cherry trees tightened like a startled cat. He was in a sweatshirt and a blue cap and his lips had dried out from the cold.
“I am going to get the campus police,” Sobran said, “if you follow me.”
Xas stepped back and realized faintly that he had been in the light. He had been standing in the light.
Sobran Jodreau pronounced his last name as joe-drew, and Emmy in the resident advisor’s office had showed him a screencap of the security camera, of the strange man who had come to drop off his wallet. Sobran was too deep into a too-cold March to have the energy to follow through on threats. He backed up a few steps, and then a few more, and then he ran, catching himself when he slipped on the caked slush.
Presently the shadows on the ground lengthened. And then they froze. Xas turned to see the string of lights coming off the nearest tree. Lucifer, beautiful under the screaming bright of the artificial lights, frost on his wings, untangling the pearlstring from the frozen branches.
Xas watched. His back stung in thin lines, two identical J-shapes furrowing around his shoulderblades lit up with acid and fire. The ghosts of the wings cast a gossamer shadow.
Lucifer hooked the pearls back around his own shoulders, arranging them finicky as a duchess, and came to Xas. He slid two fingers under Xas’ chin, curled them up so Xas had to look in his eyes.
“To me his pleasures,” Lucifer said. “The day is wrong, Xas. Not even the right season. That should have been obvious.”
“It’s obvious now.”
“Now. You should have noticed.”
“Yes,” Xas said. “I should have.”
Lucifer held his gaze. For a moment, interminable and ancient, they were both golden-eyed and new at the beginning of the world, fearfully symmetric. There were trite things to say, about making choices and following one and the dead pacts, and so forth. Xas kissed Lucifer once as a disciple, once more as a lover. Lucifer let go of him and walked away.
Zap Angeli didn’t show up at the worksite the next day. Or the next. The foreman shouted about that, called him a motherfucker. A week later Daniel saw him for a moment, in the street, near that fancy liquor store, carrying a bottle; he looked disheveled and pale, and he kept scratching at his back. Daniel gave him a half-wave. He felt bad. He knew that place.
That night, Daniel dreamed there was an angel standing in the back, in his mother’s garden, wailing without sound. When he came out the next morning for a smoke, he found a broken wine bottle and the rosebush mangled. Uprooted.