The Miracles of Ordinary Men (14 page)

Suddenly, the crack of his palm against her temple. “Let him submit absolutely,” he whispers. “Let him offer his cheek to the one who strikes it, and receive his fill of insults.”

She shuts her eyes and thinks of Timothy. Israel bends close, puts his mouth to her ear. He presses his hand against her stomach and the sudden pressure makes her arch up in pain. “Can you feel that?” he asks her, still whispering.

She nods and shakes her head, both. “No.” She vaults up and scratches a line across his face with her free hand. “Hit me harder.” Then she pulls his face toward her own.

Six

He went back to school, because there was nothing else to do. He avoided Stacey. He was curt with Emma, almost abrupt. The wings had begun to pulse waves of pain across his shoulder blades. He took codeine, which did nothing. Every time he stood in front of the class it was a performance: Sam the magician, Sam the disappearing, winged freak. They watched the puzzle. They watched him.

He'd begun to get migraines. They were worst in the early morning and came with auras, a terrible sensitivity to light. The students in his morning Shakespeare class had halos. Some were golden. Others shone orange, a few of them a light pink that faded into white. Emma's halo was purple and sat nicely against the brightness of her hair. Stacey shone yellow and red, like the top two-thirds of a traffic light.
Caution. Caution.

At home, Father Jim — whose own halo was blue, the calm colour that Sam imagined Hindu monks meant when they spoke of nirvana — cooked for him, like a housewife. He even walked the cat. “We'll call it a sabbatical,” he said. “I can leave whenever you want me to go.”

“No,” Sam said. It was morning and the priest had made coffee; he stood now in front of the stove and fried sausages, stacked pancakes. Maple syrup drizzled between each layer like glue. “It's nice, the company.” He'd forgotten how nice. How easy, to slip into the routine of being alone. “What will you do then, while you're here? Will you give Mass at the cathedral?”

“Maybe. Pancake?”

“Do you think they'll have pancakes in heaven?” Sam asked, only half joking.

The priest shrugged and slid a stack onto Sam's plate. “Why not? No sense in giving up on a good thing, I say.”

“Seriously.”

“Sam. How the hell am I supposed to know?”

The pancakes were fuffy, soaked in syrup, delicious. He would have fed a piece to the cat had Father Jim not swatted his hand away.

“Don't do that. That's not good for her.”

“It's just a pancake!”

“All the same.” The priest sat down across from him and began to cut into his own stack. “No wonder she follows you around all of the time. That's cupboard love, is what that is.”

“It is not,” Sam said, offended. “And anyway, she's fond enough of you
.
”

The priest shrugged. “Maybe. Have you heard from Doug?”

“No.” One week, and not a word. Sam had called Janet a few times, just to make sure things were okay.
It seemed that she'd taken up permanent residence in the house. She'd also gone back to being the Janet that he'd always mildly disliked; her answers were monosyllabic and irritated, as though calls from him were a ridiculous waste of her time. “But I'm sure we'll hear if anything happens.”

“Hmm,” said the priest. He drizzled maple syrup over a piece of sausage and put the whole mess in his mouth.

“What does that mean,
hmm
?”

“Nothing, really,” Father Jim said. “I just wonder how he's coping.”

His mother had been gone
now for over two weeks. Why did it feel so far away? “He'll be fine. It will take him a while, sure. But he'll be fine.”

“And you?”

“Me.” A week and a half ago, they'd hit a deer on a twisting Vancouver Island road. A week before that, he'd brought his own cat back from the dead. And a week before that, wings had sprouted from his back like flowers from the ground. He opened doors extra wide now as a matter of course, no longer thought it strange to wear his trench coat at the school. He could see auras. The wings were heavy against his back and yet, somehow, the most natural thing in the world.

“I'm fine.”

The priest snorted into his coffee. “You look fine.”

“What else am I supposed to say?” What did they say, the prophets, during that space of time before acceptance, when the world was still the same
around them and they had not yet become lost?

“Have you spoken to Bryan? Julie?”

“No,” Sam said. “But I don't talk to Julie. Not really. And Bryan's been away.” Against all expectation, an email had come to Sam several days ago. It was characteristically blunt, awkward.
Sam. Hope you're feeling better
,
see you when I get back.

“And Emma?” the priest said, watching him. “Looks like there's unfinished business between the two of you, as well.”

He was avoiding Emma, considerable feat though that was. The curtness seemed almost to encourage her — she'd become a constant fixture at school. She was first in the room in the afternoons, her face always tense and then slack with relief.
You're still here
, she might as well have said.

He had forgotten about the infinity puzzle, but discovered it one day in class as he was rummaging through his desk during a test. He pulled it out and wound the string around the metal, through and through again. More knots. The room was hushed, save the sound of scratching pencils. He twisted the string again, and when he looked up, Emma was watching him. He tapped the puzzle against the desk and then hooked one finger in each end of the string and pulled. Nothing moved.

When he looked up, she was bent over her test. He put the puzzle in his pocket, and a few minutes later he forgot about it, again.

—

They were reading Graham Greene, and some of the students had issues with Scobie.

“Makes no sense,” said one of the girls. Clara. He had to do this now, repeat their names to himself whenever they spoke. He was forgetting faces, blurring them all in their auras, in the light. Clara shone red. “If you truly believed as he did, you wouldn't do it. It's inconsistent.”

“What's inconsistent?” he asked. “Greene was trying to express a different view of spirituality. His work is rife with this struggle. It's inconsistent against the dogma, not the faith.”

“But they're the same thing.” Jodi, the star hockey player with an eye for hard facts. Green. “Faith is all about rules. If you don't know the rules, or you don't follow them, then that's it for you.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “You can't expect to think a world view that proclaims the ineffability of God could then be contained by a simple set of dos and don'ts.”

Jodi laughed. “The Ten Commandments? Hello?”

“Spirituality is supposed to be about journeying,” he said, and he waved the book in his hand. “Greene was fascinated by the struggle
to find God — how easily man could discover and lose divinity all at once.” How God could arrive in a rush of white wings and then go, just as quickly, leaving feathers behind Him to trail in the dirt.

“I still think it sounds strange,” said Jodi. “You're telling me you don't find it all at least a little ridiculous?”

Sam shrugged. “Personally? I'm not sure. I wouldn't call myself an atheist. But I wouldn't say that I believe, either.” Mildly surprised that he could still say it, that it still felt true. The wings swept over the floor.

“Then that makes no sense. If
you
don't believe it, why all the talk about journeys and whatever else? You can't stand up there and expect people to take you seriously if you're admitting right now that you're not sure?”

“Ah,” he said. “But just because I don't believe it doesn't mean it isn't true, or that it couldn't be true for other people. I also happen to think,” and here was a glimpse of Sam-before-the-wings, that long-ago teaching rock star, “that Paul McCartney died years ago and everything that's happened to ‘him' since is an elaborate hoax. But just because I
don't believe in the spectre of Paul McCartney doesn't mean that he couldn't still exist. How would I know?”

They were not convinced.

“There's nothing about the world as it is now that can't be explained by science.” Clara again. “People want to talk about God because they think that science takes all of the mystery out of the world. That's all it is. People just want a good story.”

Emma
was tracing circles in her notebook. She hadn't said anything, which wasn't surprising. What could she say? What could either
of them say, really?

“So science doesn't take the mystery out of the world, then?” What would Father Jim say, he wondered. What words were there at times like these?

Jodi shrugged. “I don't think so. There's too much about the world that we still don't know. It'll take years. It could take hundreds of years, and for all of that time people will still be thinking about this thing called God and worshipping the air like it's actually going to do something. I just think it's a waste of time.”

Sam dropped his chalk, bent down to pick it up, and spread the wings out so that they touched either side of the floor. When he raised his head, Emma's face was pink, and no one else had noticed anything. “That may be,” he said calmly. “It may be that there's no such thing as God, and it's all been one grand delusion. But you don't know
.
You might think
that you know, that you have no doubts. But you don't know what you're going to see tomorrow.” What might happen to you one morning, when you wake up with feathers in your sheets and down in your hair. “You just don't know.”

“Who's supposed to build their life on something like that?”

“You're not supposed
to,”
he said. “You just do. It just happens.” He scratched his head and strands of hair came away in his hand — he heard a small gasp, a murmur from the girls, and ignored it. He shrugged and gave them the closest truth he could. “God or no God, guys, the world itself is shaky business. You never know what's going to happen next. And if you never meet God face to face, then that
not-knowing
is about as close as you're going to get.”

—

He'd half expected her to walk out of class the moment the bell rang, but Emma hung back and stood by his desk. When the last student left, she slammed her bag against a chair. It was loud enough to startle him.

“You're a hypocrite,” she said.

“I'm not a hypocrite. I told them the truth.”

“‘The truth,'”
she mocked. “What truth,
exactly? That you don't believe in God?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You might as well have said it!” Her voice shook. “This thing — God,
whatever — this is
happening
to you. How can you stand there and say otherwise?”

“But they can't see this,” he said gently. “And even if they could — who knows? Maybe it has nothing to do with God at all. Maybe it's genetics. Maybe it's a disease.” He thought of Father Jim's Portuguese story. “People grow extra limbs. Or they get tumours that have teeth. It happens.”

“Don't talk to me like I'm one of your students!” she snapped. Sam looked up and saw a surprised face at the classroom door.

“We'll just be a moment.” Then lower, to Emma's furious face, “You
are
one of my students. And you
aren't the one waking up with feathers in your bed. Don't tell me you can explain this better than anyone else. I've been to the doctors, Emma.”
Scars.
“I've been to a priest. And they either see them or they don't.” Then, with more force than he meant, “What do you want me to
do
?”

“I want you to take responsibility,”
she said. The flash in her eyes was unnerving.

“For what?” A cat, maybe? A cat sitting in his house right now, possibly eating tuna and purring in the lap of his houseguest the priest? Or his mother, scattered in bits over the ground?

“You're being called to something,” she said. “Called out of yourself.”

“What do you expect me to do?” he asked. “Go doling miracles out to the blind?”

“You'll find out,” she said. “God will tell you.”

“And what if God doesn't? What if this is all that happens, and I'm just supposed to walk around like a freak for the rest of my life?” Why hadn't he noticed that zeal in her eyes before? The Emma whose hips he had liked — where had she gone? “This isn't happening to you,” he said, sharply. “Don't presume to tell me what God
may or may not say.”

“But God will speak to you,” she said. “You're a teacher. You understand. The lessons come, eventually. God is like that as well. It just takes time.”

Had she gone insane? Did this happen to everyone hit by a sudden divine flash — did words go out the window, did logic rush out the door in the wake of holy power?

“You — don't — know,” he said. He felt so old. He picked up his bag and lifted it over his head, then settled the strap carefully between the wings. “Emma — this could be something terrible. Or it could be wonderful.” Or it could be both, and neither. Who was he to say?

“How are you supposed to decide anything if you don't know?” she snapped, echoing the others. “You need to build a life on
something
.”
She shook her head. “A lot of people would give anything to have this kind of opportunity.”

The thought was so ridiculous it nearly stopped him where he stood — angel factories,
the wings lined up and colour-coded like linen shirts.
Heavenly dispensation
,
right here
,
right now!
“Maybe,” he said again. “If I find anyone willing, I'll be sure to let you know.”

—

A few days later, she tried a different tactic. She began to follow him in between classes — he caught glimpses of her hair behind him in the hall, and she lingered in the doorway after class, an uncertain smile on her face that would then disappear as soon as it had come. That afternoon he caught her outside, standing by his car.

“You can't keep doing this,” he said, again. “People will talk.”

“People are already talking about you,” she said.

“People always talk about me.” He thought back to the student who had died. He shrugged and tried to make a joke of it. “I'm going bald faster than an eighty-year-old man. What's not to talk about?”