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  Books by Christopher Conlon

  NOVELS

  A Matrix of Angels

  Midnight on Mourn Street

  SHORT FICTION

  Thundershowers at Dusk: Gothic Stories

  Saying Secrets: American Stories

  POETRY

  Starkweather Dreams

  Mary Falls: Requiem for Mrs. Surratt

  The Weeping Time

  Gilbert and Garbo in Love

  DRAMA

  Midnight on Mourn Street: A Play in Two Acts

  AS EDITOR

  A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock

  He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson

  Poe’s Lighthouse

  The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl

  Filet of Sohl

  A MATRIX OF ANGELS

  A novel by

  Christopher Conlon

  Creative Guy Publishing

  Vancouver | Canada

  A Matrix of Angels

  by Christopher Conlon

  ©2011 Christopher Conlon

  All rights reserved. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-10 1894953-72X

  ISBN-13 978-1894953-726

  ebook edition – first edition.

  This book is also available as a limited edition hardcover and in trade paperback editions.

  Cover art: Filippino Lippi (c. 1457–1504), “The Vision of St. Bernard” (detail).

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Conlon, Christopher, 1962-

  A matrix of angels [electronic resource] / Christopher Conlon.

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-894953-72-6

  I. Title.

  PS3603.O559M37 2011a 813'.6 C2010-906997-8

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A Matrix of Angels

  Author’s Note

  “A Matrix of Angels”: The Original Short Story

  About the Author

  for Pete Allen

  nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

  the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

  compels me with the colour of its countries,

  rendering death and forever with each breathing

  —e.e. cummings

  …a child’s major attention has to be concentrated on

  how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour,

  reveals itself as merciless.

  —James Baldwin

  —One—

  IN MY DREAM Lucy Sparrow stands facing me in the night surf, fists on her hips, waves bursting softly about her thighs, looking much as I remember her at twelve when the two of us were best friends forever: blood sisters. She wears no bathing suit, but isn’t exactly naked; instead her body appears featureless, like a doll’s, lacking nipples or navel, freckles or scars—incomplete, unfinished. Yet her face is as it was in life. The big raincloud-colored eyes, the shapeless nose, the tangled dirty-blonde hair splayed to her shoulders.

  Little happens in the dream. She just stares at me, her expression flat, unreadable—neither friendly nor hostile—while from the shore I whisper over and over, a hot ache pulsing in my throat: Lucy. Lucy. But a sudden shriek overhead (a bird? a bat?) makes me flinch reflexively and I glance up in fear.

  By the time I look toward her again, I’m alone in the darkness.

  As I spiraled slowly toward wakefulness I turned, as I always did, to drape my arm over Donald, and was momentarily perturbed, as I always was, to find that he wasn’t there. It had been two years since we’d shared a bed, yet my semi-conscious habits hadn’t changed. I’ve read that amputees react the same way, still believing in the minutes before reality comes hammering over them that their severed limb is attached, healthy, perfectly normal. And then they wake up.

  I woke up.

  The room was strange. For a moment I didn’t see it as a room at all, but rather as a disconnected array of random, anonymous components: desk, lamp, mirror, curtain. I had to shake my head and lift myself onto my elbows to recall that I was in a mid-priced sort of hotel in a small town called Quiet. Quiet, California, where I’d lived for some months as a girl but which was never, never home.

  Depression is wonderful for sleep—for mine, anyway. It takes me into the deepest of all possible slumbers, where there’s no light, no sound, no sensation, and no desire for them. Fifteen hours straight, sometimes. The only trouble is that upon waking I’m not refreshed in the least; it’s almost as if I hadn’t slept at all. It was that way now. I felt like dropping back to the pillow again, pulling the starch-stiffened sheets over my head and falling away from the world once more. After all, I reasoned, I was on no set schedule; the book festival in Santa Barbara had ended the day before and I had several days entirely to myself. No one needed me anywhere for anything. I was free. And so the pull of the pillow, the sheets, the warm blankets was overwhelming.

  Still, I managed to sit up, stretch, wipe the muzziness from my eyes. And as I sat there, vaguely aware of the sunlight glowing through the hotel room curtains, I realized to my amazement that I had dreamed.

  I never dream. I haven’t since I was a child. Some brain researchers claim we all do, but that a small percentage of people like me simply don’t recall them—well, it may be. What I know is that I’d never in my adult life had a dream that I remembered upon waking. The night before, for the first time, I’d had one. About Lucy.

  I breathed slowly, wondering. Lucy Sparrow, of whom—until last week—I’d not had a conscious thought in thirty years. A figure I’d hurled into the black waters of oblivion three decades before. An intolerable memory. Lucy Sparrow.

  I’d been sitting in my study—I work from my home, in Tucson—going over final arrangements for the festival on my laptop, re-confirming my hotel reservation and schedule, when it occurred to me that Santa Barbara wasn’t all that far south of a place I’d once lived, however briefly, when I was twelve years old. How long had it been since I’d given a moment’s thought to Quiet, California? And yet as soon as the name came back to me I knew that I would drive there after the event. Just to look. To see. To walk those streets again. It would be the opposite of a sentimental journey; to think of that period of my life brought me only hazy, reverberating pain, like an ancient wound freshly prodded. But I’d survived it—all of it. Quiet, California held no terrors for me. Or so I told myself.

  Even then, while making new reservations and plotting my route, I didn’t really think of Lucy. If she crossed the landscape of my mind at all it was only glancingly, a long-forgotten figure of no greater importance than other girls I’d known whose names now came easily back into my consciousness: Melissa Deaver, Susan Roselli, Miriam Doyle. The teachers, too. Mrs. Petrie. Mr. and Mrs. Lowther, the young couple. The principal, Mr. Blatt. And the people I lived with then, the mysterious Aunt Louise and Uncle Frank to whom I’d been shuffled off inexplicably in the middle of a rain-splintered night.

  Why do I have to go, Dad?

  Mom, what did I do?

  All thirty years gone. I was a grown woman now with an excellent career, a mortgage. My marriage had failed, and my daughter and I rarely spoke, but I was a success by most standards. Yet I felt like something else, something that made me want to collapse back into the bed and hide myself away.

  Donald, please have Jess come to the phone.

  I’ve tried, Frances. She refuses. I can’t physically drag her.

  I have a right to speak to my daughter, Donald!

  Your daughter is in her bedroom crying, Frances.

  I threw my legs over the bed, determined to stand
. It was puzzling that I was nude; I’m not in the habit of sleeping nude. No one was with me, certainly. But then I noticed the bottle of Calvert’s whiskey on the side table, the partly-full glass, the bucket of water which last night had likely been ice. It came back to me, dimly. I’d decided, after an hour or two of TV and drinking, to take a shower, but had fallen asleep instead…

  Passed out, my mind amended.

  Of course I’m aware of the irony: a melancholic divorcee with a drinking problem and a daughter who doesn’t speak to her making her living—and it’s a good living—as a creator of children’s books. What would the second-graders of the world think, I wondered, if they could see me now—the celebrated lady who wrote and illustrated the stories of Flat-Head Fred and Mary the Motor Scooter?

  I noticed that I’d left one of my titles, Mary’s Trip to Muffin Land, on the side table, its back cover facing up. There I was in a little photo in the corner, full color, an attractive but somewhat hysterical-looking woman wearing too much makeup (what had I been thinking with that eyeliner?) and obviously fake blonde highlights in her otherwise nondescript, practically colorless hair. What saved the image was the smile, all dimples and glossy lips and big shining teeth. People often refer to my smile. Even the man who’d introduced me at the festival used the old cringe-inducing “lights up a room” line about it. I could observe that quality in the cover photo, but it seemed to have nothing to do with me. What I mostly saw when I looked at that picture was a woman who was hiding—behind makeup, hair dye, a “dazzling” smile, but hiding just as surely as I wanted to hide now, by throwing the bedclothes over myself and sinking back into oblivion.

  I have visitation rights, you know, Donald.

  No one has stopped you from visiting with Jess.

  Yes, under your watchful eye, right? Like I’m some kind of criminal!

  I poured half an inch of last night’s libation into the glass and tossed it back. Then I stood, determined to face the day like any other grown-up person. I showered, threw on jeans, T-shirt, sneakers—it was a lovely spring day, warm, sun-rich—and, after munching on an apple and banana I’d brought with me, headed downstairs, through the lobby, and out into the town of Quiet, California.

  I’d not really seen it the night before. I’d arrived late, tired from the festival (all those mothers beaming at the celebrated Ms. Pastan, thanking me for getting their children interested in reading) and the drive. I’d done nothing but go straight to my room after checking in. But now here I was, on streets I’d not walked since I was twelve years old.

  It would be nice to report that a bracing wave of nostalgia overwhelmed me immediately, but the fact is that I recognized nothing I saw. I crossed the parking lot and peered up and down the four-lane road before me (its creative name was “Main Street”) and tried to think of what had been here thirty years earlier. But in the face of the traffic—there was a tremendous lot of it for what was supposed to still be a small town—and the shopping center across the way with its Burger King, its Starbucks, its K-Mart, I couldn’t think. Of course it didn’t help that I’d not lived here long; in terms of time, Quiet represented hardly a feeble dot on my personal radar screen, even if in memory it occupied a much larger (if unvisited) space. Yet I knew I would remember if I could simply get my bearings, so I turned back to the hotel office for a map of the town.

  Now, searching up and down Main Street, it began to come back to me. Nothing was familiar, but with the help of the map I managed to orient myself: turning left on Main Street, I saw, led to a branch called Bridgewater Avenue (it literally included a bridge) which connected finally to the housing tract where I’d lived. There it was: Riverfield Road. I even knew the number still: 319. In the other direction were more places I recalled—the library, the elementary school—but those could wait. The distance to my old house was only a mile, so rather than using the car I started to walk. Drinking problem aside, I try to keep myself in shape.

  The map indicated that Quiet, California was “A Great Place to Raise a Child,” a “Thriving Community of Five Thousand and Growing!” I could remember the old sign at the city limits, Quiet. Pop. 750. Looking around at the bustling conglomeration of stores and stoplights the town had become I felt like a relic from another century, which of course is exactly what I was. It seemed a pleasant place really, clean, modern, clearly affluent, yet faceless, without character; it might have been a mid-sized village anywhere in the country. Only the tall palm trees lining the roadway betrayed its California setting.

  When I reached Bridgewater Avenue, however, things changed. Here there had been almost no development—there was little I didn’t seem to recognize in approaching the bridge, and as I walked out onto its two-lane span, I realized that it was the same bridge I’d ridden across on the school bus, that I’d walked and run and biked over countless times. It hadn’t altered, hadn’t been widened or rebuilt. I knew it immediately. What an unsettling feeling to stand on it again, to look down at the dry riverbed a hundred feet below and see that it hadn’t changed either. No new housing, no business development; just a riverbed of dirt, rocks, and wild grasses where once, many years ago, millions of gallons of water had rushed headlong toward the sea.

  A large truck swooshed past, its blast of air pushing at me like a pair of hard hands. At the same moment a memory stabbed into my mind, making me gasp. My breath came fast and shallow. I felt dizzy. Blinking rapidly, I leaned over the safety rail, fearful I was about to throw up.

  Quiet, California. A Great Place to Raise a Child.

  Was that line meant as a sick joke?

  I inhaled deeply, slowly exhaled. I closed my eyes for a moment, regaining my balance. My head throbbed. There was a sour taste in my throat. I was hardly aware of the traffic passing by each way on the bridge.

  A great place to raise a child.

  Quiet, California held no terrors for me, I kept telling myself. No terrors at all.

  I knew the house at once, though its color had gone from yellow to blue and the pitted asphalt of the old driveway had been replaced with smooth white concrete. There were perky green bushes lining the walkway to the door now, and the door itself was different, imposing polished oak. But these changes were trivial. It was the same long, low house in which I’d once lived, a California rambler much like many others on this street.

  The neighborhood itself, like the town, had clearly undergone something of a renaissance. Each house in my range of vision seemed bigger, brighter, better maintained than it had been back then. Looking carefully I realized that many of the houses actually were larger, with additions in the back or on the side which I knew hadn’t been there in my time. None of the cars in the driveways were more than two or three years old. The lawns were immaculate. It was not a rich person’s neighborhood, but it had become comfortably well off.

  Naturally it had crossed my mind to wonder whether Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise might still live here; I’d had no contact with them since the day I left the house forever, when I wasn’t yet thirteen. But it was unlikely. They’d been in their mid-fifties, and neither had seemed in robust health. I could hardly imagine that the two of them, well into their eighties, might be sitting in the house at that exact moment—Frank reading his newspaper barefoot in his shirtless suspenders and Louise watching her game shows on television with a Marlboro in one hand and a can of Budweiser in the other.

  I stood staring at this house of remembered pain for a long time. Finally I mounted the walkway and moved to the front door, knocked.

  No answer.

  I backed away. Glancing about a bit nervously, making sure no neighbors were looking through their window curtains at me, I stepped across the lawn, around the side of the house, and looked quickly into the backyard. An unfamiliar patio was there now: smooth concrete, outdoor furniture, children’s toys, a grill. It looked, I thought, very pleasant, but it had nothing to do with anything I recalled. My eyes moved to the back of the lawn, near the fence. A small flowerbed huddled there; I
was shocked to discover that the big old leafy pepper tree was gone, as if it had never existed. I had spent endless hours under that tree; it was a separate world from the grim one in which I lived.

  Finally I looked at the back of the house itself, beheld the familiar rear window which led to what had been my bedroom. I was surprised at how small that window really was. I remembered sliding it open one spring night thirty years ago, climbing out of it. This was the window I’d used to run away. Not from home: 319 Riverfield Road was never my home. To run away, that’s all.

  I stepped close to it, knowing I’d best move quickly; famous children’s author Frances Pastan didn’t need to get arrested for trespassing. The blinds were closed (blinds, I noticed, not curtains, as I’d had); I couldn’t see in at all. As I stood on the concrete that had once been grass outside what had once been my window, I touched the exterior window sill, passed my hand briefly along the wall. Here, I thought. I did it right here.

  And she…she stood…

  I wouldn’t think of it.

  I made my way to the front of the house again, stepped back onto the public sidewalk. I stood looking at the house for a long moment, uneasy washes of emotion coursing through me. At last I turned to take in the house across the street: 320. I inhaled sharply when I realized that it wasn’t the same house that I knew from back then. What had been there was another rambler, not substantially different from my own house except that it was considerably more run-down, even dilapidated; no, what I was seeing now was a completely different structure, a large and lovely two-story home with big windows and a front lawn so velvety smooth that it looked like Astroturf. At some point in the past thirty years they’d demolished the old house. Literally taken a wrecking ball to it. Destroyed it. The thought made me sad, though I couldn’t have said why.