Prophets for the End of Time| Chapter | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Prophets for the End of Time
For four weeks after he first arrived, well into the beginning of June, Paolo Diosana said nothing to Clayton Pinkes or, as far as Clayton could tell, to anyone. Outside at recess, Diosana would stand alone, bouncing a small, blue rubber ball against the red bricks of St. Catherine’s school, catching the ball with one hand, the other hand shoved always in his pocket. Clayton watched him do that for a few days, debating whether or not to go and talk to him, and always decided against it.
"What do you think about the new kid?" Dickie Lanpher asked Clayton once. Dickie had become a lot nicer to Clayton lately. While Dickie was out ill, Clayton had yelled at Ben Raymond and Mike Delveccio for referring to Dickie as "The Puke-faced Wonder" and "King Vomit." The story had gotten back to Dickie.
"Paolo Diosana?" Clayton asked.
"Only new kid we’ve had all year. What do you think?"
Clayton shrugged. "How’m I supposed to know? How’s anybody supposed to?"
"Yeah. Not a talker." A burst of shouts from the grass playing field made Dickie turn his head. "Hey, they’re playing Smear the Queer with the Football. The lunch mother must not be paying attention. You wanna play Smear the Queer with the Football?"
Clayton was still watching Paolo Diosana. Paolo looked in their direction just then, and Clayton smiled and waved his hand over his head. Paolo nodded once and returned to his endless ball-bouncing.
"You wanna play Smear the Queer with the Football?" Dickie persisted.
"Yeah," said Clayton.
That afternoon in Social Studies—Sister Leo Agnes’s flu was still dragging on, and Mr. Kallur seemed to have taken on the status of permanent substitute—the class began a review study of the Civil War. "It was a war that divided this great nation in two," said Mr. Kallur. He hugged his leather briefcase, paced around the room. "Brother against brother, father against son, testing the strength of the noble experiment called Democracy. By the end, it had cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans."
Clayton was writing "tens of thousands of Americans" in his notebook when he heard Paolo Diosana say, "Hundreds of thousands."
Kallur heard, too. He walked to the front of Diosana’s aisle. "Pardon me?" he said, in a way Clayton knew really meant Paolo should be the one asking pardon.
"Hundreds of thousands," Paolo said.
Kallur’s lips were a tight grin. "I heard what you said. I was alluding to the fact that your comments weren’t offered in a way standard to this classroom’s rules."
Paolo rested his chin on one hand and limply raised the other arm. "Hundreds of thousands," he said. "Five hundred twenty-nine thousand two hundred and sixty-eight."
Kallur sliced off the rising chuckles by cutting a swath with his eyes from the door to the windows. Then he set down his briefcase, tugged at the elbow of each sleeve on his suit jacket, and leaned forward with his palms flat on the front desk of the row. "You’re a Civil War enthusiast, Mr. Diosana?"
Paolo sat up straight and focused his eyes directly on Kallur’s. It was the first thing Clayton had seen Paolo fully focused on since he’d arrived, except for that little blue ball he always tossed against the side of the school building. "I follow wars in general, Mr. Kallur."
"World War I?"
"One hundred sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-two Americans dead."
"World War II?"
"Four hundred five thousand four hundred and twenty."
"The Vijayanagar battle at Talikota?"
Paolo Diosana opened his mouth as if he were going to answer, but after a sidewise glance at Clayton he sat back and dropped his focus from Kallur. Mr. Kallur remained leaning on the desk, smiling, then broke to continue his lecture on the Civil War. Every few minutes, after stating some fact, he would say, "Am I right about that, Mr. Diosana?" or "Please correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Diosana." But Paolo seemed untouched by the sarcasm; he had again withdrawn into himself, as if nothing had happened. But right before the end of the class, Paolo slipped Clayton a note that read:
troops present, battle at Talikota—
foot soldiers: 703,129
mounted soldiers: 32,612
elephants: 551
prostitutes: 12,483
Clayton looked over to see if Paolo was kidding, but Paolo sat slumped and disinterested as always. Clayton slipped him a note that said, "Don’t worry, you’re smarter than him," but Paolo Diosana didn’t answer.
Clayton kissed his mother—on the cheek, quickly—and called "G’night" to his father. His father grunted from behind the sports section. His mother said, "Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite."
"Clever, Mom," Clayton said, and went upstairs. He knelt by the side of his bed and slowly, word by word, went through a Hail Mary, an Our Father, and the Act of Contrition. Then he added, "If you really are my managing angel, appear to me now." He opened his eyes and looked around the bedroom. Off-white walls, two throw rugs, a bookshelf half filled with Hardy Boys mysteries, no angel. "God," he said, "if I really do have a managing angel, show me some sign . . ." He paused, because it seemed more respectful to give God extra time to answer " . . . now." A bare ceiling light bulb, the closet door, the window that looked out over the slanted roof of the garage. Silence.
Clayton waited about three minutes more. He stood up and took off all his clothes. After he’d climbed into bed he got up again and put on his underwear, just in case a sign or an angel were late in coming. How long did prayers take to travel? Ten minutes later he took the underwear off again, figuring God knew what he looked like naked anyway. He lay awake. "C’mon, Paolo," he said. "Please."
Half an hour later he was still awake. Nobody was coming. No signs, no angels. Bust. Zilch. Harassed by Heaven and then ignored. Fine. Okay.
In the boredom of waiting, he started playing one of the stories in his mind, one of the night stories. It started playing itself, really, but he closed his eyes, put his hands under the bedcovers, and let it play.
In this night story, there’s been a nuclear war. Somehow only he has survived. He’s never worked out the details on how that could be. But the school is in rubble. He’s alone, except—yes, he hears crying, over there behind that pile of rubble. He investigates and finds Julie Ward. Her brown curls are stringy, a mess, her face is dirty, and her shirt is torn and shows part of her bra. Her eyes are blue. He helps her up, he is strong and reassures her, and he takes her to a place where they can have shelter for a while; he finds food—Clayton rushes the story at this point—and the first evening it’s cold, so they share a blanket together. "You’ve always been special to me," Julie says. "And now we’re together. Clayton, could you hold me?" Clayton holds her and feels her arms, her legs. "And kiss me?" she adds, and he feels her lips, her hands touching him, her naked skin, and et cetera and et cetera until Clayton is alone again back in his room and sweating, rolling over and feeling guilty, believing he is sick in his head somehow, thinking God must despise sick people like Clayton Pinkes.
At recess Clayton walked right between the brick wall of the school building and Paolo Diosana. He snatched the little blue ball out of the air. Paolo crossed his arms and smiled.
"You don’t talk much," Clayton said.
Paolo nodded.
"People aren’t gonna like you. Why don’t you talk much?"
"I don’t have a lot to say."
"Bull. You’re smarter than Kallur, and he always has a lot to say."
"He does have a lot to say."
"Yeah, he does."
Paolo reached in his trouser pocket and pulled out another blue ball. He walked a few steps down from Clayton and went back to bouncing the ball against the school building.
"But you’re smarter than Kallur," Clayton said.
"Yes, I’m smarter."
"But you don’t say anything."
"I’m quiet. I’m smart and I’m quiet."
"Yeah," said Clayton.
Paolo rolled his eyes and stuffed the second ball back into his pocket. "This chat is starting to sound like Hemingway dialog."
Clayton couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He didn’t know what Hemingway dialog was.
"I’m quiet because if I start talking, Pinhead, I sound like a maniac. Ideas come at light speed and I’m a barrage of non sequiturs oscillating between the mundane and the bizarre. I turn hyperkinetic, I make remarks too sophisticated to be grasped by healthy people, and I sacrifice the James-Dean-slash-Gandhi facade of cool and wise for a vaudevillian charade."
Clayton couldn’t think of much to say to that, either, so he said, "Are you an angel?"
Paolo Diosana said, "Yeah."
Well, thought Clayton. That’s what he’d wanted to know, and now he’d asked it. Well. How about that? Well.
"Which angel?" Clayton asked. "Gabriel?"
Paolo’s body jerked a little. "Oh, please," he said. "Gabriel? Am I that bad at this? How obnoxious do I look? One lousy luck-of-the-draw two thousand years ago on the Mary Had A Little Lamb shift, and Gabriel hasn’t let anybody forget it since. Every time he walks into a room it’s, ‘Hail, guys, are you all full of grace?’ and ‘Blessed art thou, old sport.’ " Paolo sneered. "You know, we hold an annual convention in Stockholm, and each year Gabriel jumps on a bicycle in Oslo to make the trip, and he goes out of his way to cut through the city of Hell, Norway, just so he can arrive at the hotel and say, ‘I went through Hell to get here, ha ha.’ " Paolo Diosana snorted and leaned a shoulder against the brick wall. "And each year, everybody laughs. Am I Gabriel? Spare me, Pinhead."
Clayton decided that Paolo was right: he did sound like a maniac once he got talking. "Are you the Archangel Michael, then?"
Paolo’s face changed, just for a second. His eyes widened at the same moment his eyebrows lowered. He shifted a glance quickly to the left, as if someone were watching, and bit his lower lip. "No," he said, "not Michael. I’m Raphael, okay? My name is Raphael."
Raphael sounded like an angel’s name. Clayton thought he’d heard it before but wasn’t sure. "How do I know—" Clayton stopped, because if Paolo were a real angel he wouldn’t want to insult him.
"Know what?" Paolo was smirking.
"That you’re not the devil?"
Paolo laughed. "There is no devil. Demons are just a thought experiment used to shift blame. Besides, who needs demons?" Paolo reached out and patted him gently on the side of his face. "You’ve got us. You’ve got angels."
Then there was a scream from the grass playing field, and Dickie Lanpher’s voice yelling, "Oh, shit! Oh, shit!" A group of the boys who had been playing Smear the Queer with the Football were gathered in a circle, and Dickie was lying on the ground next to the loose ball.
By the time Clayton got to the field, the lunch mother had also gotten there. "Stay away from him," she said. "Nobody move him."
"My shoulder, oh shit!" Dickie kept yelling. His arm was twisted the wrong way, his elbow forward although he was lying face up. Dickie was crying.
"Now you don’t need to curse and swear!" the lunch mother hollered. "Who did it? Who tackled him?"
"I didn’t do nothin’!" Ben Raymond yelled. "I just tackled him normal! He fell wrong, it’s his fault!"
"Oh, Jesus," Dickie said, a lot quieter because he had looked down and noticed his elbow facing up.
The lunch mother grabbed Ben Raymond’s shirt collar and shouted back, "You do not talk to me in that tone of voice! Don’t you talk to me like that!"
Clayton knelt beside Dickie. "You’ll be all right, Dickie. You’ll be okay."
"Hey, Clayton," Dickie said, and then he glanced down at his elbow again. "Isn’t that weird? Shit, that’s weird."
The lunch mother hauled Clayton back by yanking his arm. "I said to stay away from him and not touch him!" She turned back to Ben Raymond and said, "My job is to watch all of you, and now look what’s happened. How do you think this makes me look?"
"I didn’t do nothin’!" Ben Raymond yelled again.
Paolo Diosana had slipped in at some point. He kneeled next to Dickie. "How’s it going?" Paolo said to him. "Been a rotten month, no?"
Dickie closed his eyes and inhaled in short gasps.
"Don’t sweat, Dickie. Be glib. All the best heroes are glib when they’re in pain."
"I don’t know what glib means," Dickie said. "Oh, shit."
"Glib? Uh, glib?" Paolo rolled his eyes upward, as if he were reading the definition of "glib" off the top of his eyes sockets. "James Bond is glib when they’re shooting at him. Spiderman is glib when he fights Doc Ock." He looked back down at Dickie. "Yeah, Jesus was glib, hanging on the cross saying, ‘Hey, can’t a guy get some water up here?’ and ‘Where’s Mom? Anybody see Mom?’ "
Dickie made a chuckle that turned into another sob. "Guy walks into a bar," Dickie managed to say, "and asks, ‘Do you serve Italians here?’ "
"That’s the spirit," Paolo said. The lunch mother was still ten feet away arguing with Ben Raymond. Clayton wanted to yell at her. Shouldn’t she get the school nurse? Call an ambulance?
Clayton looked back at Paolo and saw him rolling up the long sleeves of his dress shirt. That image stayed with him for years—Paolo slowly folding up one sleeve, just above the elbow, then turning to roll up the other, so concentrated on that one act that you would have believed it was the single most important thing that had ever occurred on the face of the Earth. The gesture first struck Clayton as extremely adult, way more adult than anyone on the grass playing field that day, including the lunch mother. But immediately after that first impression, the gesture didn’t seem to have anything to do with acting adult. Paolo’s intense fix on those sleeves, the calm importance of that act to Paolo, meant something about believing and about really really knowing what to do when nothing could be done. Not a "Well, I guess I’ll do this" sort of knowing, but an "I must do this" sort. For Clayton, Paolo’s focus on rolling up his sleeves eclipsed in importance even the act of healing that Paolo performed on Dickie’s shoulder and arm.
The lunch mother finally saw Paolo beside Dickie, and repeated her order for everyone to leave him alone. She yanked at the back of Paolo’s shirt collar, but small, short, skinny Paolo Diosana didn’t jerk backwards the slightest bit. She yanked harder, and this time she managed to rip part of the collar from its seam. Paolo reached down and took hold of Dickie’s arm. He made a quick half-twist of the arm, then shoved forward. Clayton heard the faint popping sound. Paolo kneaded Dickie’s shoulder through the shirt.
"Jesus, that feels all right," Dickie said.
Paolo glanced back at the lunch mother. "Take two aspirin and call her a bitch in the morning." Then he looked over to Clayton. "That’s all right to say in the 1970’s, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a little sexist, but it’s glib."
Paolo walked away, back toward the school. The lunch mother was yelling after him, then yelling at Ben Raymond again when she got no response from Paolo, then yelling at Dickie to stay down and not move, even though Dickie was swinging his arm around and saying, "It’s okay. It feels great. It was just popped out. He popped it back in."
Clayton stayed on the field for a minute, and then he went up toward the school building. He found Paolo crouched down around the corner by the side of the building that faced St. Catherine’s church itself. Paolo’s knees were bent up to his chin. His arms were wrapped in front of his legs, making him look like a tight, little ball up against the brick wall.
"I believe in you now," Clayton said.
"Yeah."
"You really are an angel."
"Christ," said Paolo, "I hate theatrics."
Clayton lost sight of Paolo after school. There was the normal rush across the parking lot by the older students, Clayton standing with all the younger ones waiting for buses, and although he scanned most of the faces as they passed, he missed Paolo. Of course, an angel could dematerialize, right? An angel could step around a corner, go poof, like that, and be back wherever it was angels went during their off-hours. Places like Heaven, or limbo. Or Stockholm, for conventions.
Clayton decided he didn’t know a heck of a lot about angels.
He took a seat in the back of the bus behind two fourth-grade girls who whispered and giggled the entire way home. The more he tried to ignore their noise, the more it was the only thing he heard. Whisper, giggle, whisper-whisper giggle. He punched the back of their seat once, but they must have decided it was accidental and went right on.
He got off at his stop and tried to walk casually away from the bus, pretending to himself that it was just a coincidence the thing was there at the same time he was getting home. He waited for the bus to turn the next corner before he crossed the street to his house. There was a girl’s bike leaning against the pine tree by the righthand side of the garage, and Julie Ward was standing in front of the garage door.
"I beat you home," she said. She giggled.
Clayton stood there. Despite all the words in the English language, every word he’d learned from the time he first spoke to the present, he couldn’t think of a way to put any of them together to say anything intelligent. This was the absolutely most awkward occurrence of his thirteen years of life.
"Well, hi," Julie said, and she stared down at his feet.
Good, that was a good lead-in, a perfect way to start. "Hi," Clayton said back.
"I hope you don’t mind me coming over."
"No," said Clayton. "Not at all. No, not at all." He wanted to be sure she knew he really didn’t mind, so he said again, "Not at all." Then he asked, "How’d you know where I live?"
Julie looked up and talked fast. "Oh, I asked Rhonda to find out from Gary Roach and Gary asked Tom because Tom said he came over here to play last year, and so he told me."
"Oh," said Clayton. "That was a good way to find out."
Then they said nothing for half a minute.
"It’s a nice house. It’s big."
"Yeah," said Clayton. "It’s even bigger inside." Stupid. Why was he always saying such stupid things?
"It’s a colonial, right? My folks have a split-level. Except it’s yellow, not white."
Clayton had no idea if the house was a colonial or not. He looked across the street at some of the other houses. He supposed his house really was a little bigger, but not by much.
"You know, you’ve always been special to me," Julie said.
Clayton wiped sweat off his palms on the back of his trousers. He kept his hands behind his back.
"And now we’re together," Julie said. Her eyes looked funny. She licked her lips. "Clayton, could you hold me?"
Clayton needed to clasp his hands in front of his trousers. Julie took hold of each of his wrists and gently put his arms around her waist. Clayton looked toward the front door of the house to see if his mother was looking out.
"And kiss me?" She put her lips against his, and Clayton felt all of his muscles shaking. He was afraid he must look as quivery as images on television look when both the stove and the vacuum cleaner were running. He closed his eyes and tried to bring on one of the flashes. He would have really, really appreciated one of the flashes just then. But there was nothing, except Julie’s tongue starting to brush against his lips. Clayton couldn’t open his own lips and couldn’t even move his tongue.
She pulled her face back from his, but she kept every inch of the front of her body pressed against every inch of the front of his. He needed to adjust himself, she must have been noticing that, and he could think of nothing else.
"Just think," Julie said. "If there were a nuclear war and we were the only survivors, this could go on and on and on." Then she let go of him and laughed—not giggles, pure howls, and tears coming to her eyes. Clayton no longer needed to adjust himself. Undiluted panic did that.
Julie sat down next to the pine trees, practically weeping into the sleeves of her sweater. She stopped once and looked up at him. The eyes were green. Julie’s eyes had always been blue. But Julie’s eyes were green. She started laughing all over again. "Oh, God," she said, "poor Pinhead. My poor, little Pinhead."
Clayton felt his mind creeping back to him. "Paolo?" he said. "Raphael?"
Julie was obviously straining to hold back more laughter. "I was going to rip a hole in my shirt so you could see the bra strap, but I thought, no, that’s overkill." Then laughter again, and, "My poor Pinhead." The person who wasn’t, after all, Julie Ward disappeared. Poof. Like that.
Clayton looked toward the sky. "Paolo!" he shouted. "Raphael! You . . . you . . ."
What do you call an angel when you’re angry?
Clayton went inside. He walked past his mother without saying hello. He brushed his teeth, flossed, brushed them again, and slept fully clothed that night.
This is what a night of sleep is like when you know there are angels, you suspect there aren’t demons, you hope God is paying attention and also hope He isn’t, and you wonder who’s on your side:
At 10:00 p.m. you kiss your mother good night and she says, "Say your prayers, honey." You kiss her again and she looks at you funny. You pull down the top of the sports section so you can look your father in the eye and say, "Sleep good, Pop," and he says, "Good night, champ," as if you both always did that and said that.
You wonder as you walk up the stairs what your parents were like when they were teenagers, and you realize how little you know about them, even though your mother always tells stories about Cousin Whozit and Uncle Somebody. You would feel hard-pressed and stupid if anyone ever asked you to repeat even one of those stories.
Then you climb into bed. You’ve taken off only your shoes. By 11:30 p.m. you haven’t even moved. Your eyes are still open. You keep listening for sounds, and it worries you because the only ones you hear are the same old creaking of the house settling in and one or two cars turning the corner down the road from your home. You think about your house being a colonial. If you ever buy a house, it won’t be a colonial, and it won’t be a split-level either.
You drift off for just a moment. You wake suddenly, because you had started to dream. You feel naked. It’s June, you’re sweating from blankets and a full set of clothes, but you’re naked, you are. But it’s not your fault.
You drift off again, snap awake again. Finally your body just gives up; your mind doesn’t bother with any more dreams, because by now it knows you won’t get the message anyway.
You’re going to beat up Paolo Diosana in the morning.
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