The Redemption of Marvin Fuster - Patrick Sean Lee (best english novels to read txt) 📗

was light brown—but brown it was, indeed—with salt and pepper at the temples. The eyes sparkled instead of lolling lifelessly, like those of a dead fish floating at the top of a stagnant pool. As he stood there staring at the image statue-like, a thread jiggled in his brain. A thread, that is what it felt like, he thought. Uncomfortable and squirming through the ruffles and folds inside his head. The image in the mirror vanished behind a series of numbers and symbols as the thread coiled and then uncoiled, slithering about. He recognized what had appeared in front of him as a formula, or a theory of some sort written on a blackboard, but what it meant or signified he had no idea. But then again, it hit him, he did; something to do with genetic structure.

Genetic structure? I’ve never even heard of the term before…

A noise from the doorway caused Marvin to blink, once, twice, three times in quick succession. The Marvin he knew so well had returned by the last flutter. He shook his sopping head of hair, sending an afternoon flurry of showers in all directions, and turned full-face in the direction of the sound. Esmeralda stood five feet away, holding a white towel that draped over her arm with her mouth wide open. He was not Errol Flynn, not even Karl Malden, and he was naked. Esmeralda’s round brown eyes shifted downward, and a faint smile crept upward, replacing the first reaction of surprise.

“Oh my goodness.”

Esmeralda Garcia did not turn away. Marvin followed the laser line of her sight, then covered himself with his hands. He looked back up at her and smiled sheepishly.

“I forgot about the towel. Stupid me,” he explained.

“How did you think you’d dry yourself, silly boy? You did not know I would return with this?” she said holding the towel up. “I think you did.” Her Latin smile grew.

“No…I mean, I don’t know. I was thinking of more important things. I guess.”

“Than drying off?  You are playing with me, you devil, you.”

Marvin began to back up, in the narrow lane between the showers and the sinks, toward the wall abutting the central hall. Esmeralda stepped forward, matching his tentative steps with two of her own.

“No, no I’m not. Honest Injun’.”

Esmeralda had closed the gap and was preparing to lasso him with the towel. “Then you would like to, wouldn’t you Marvin Fooster?” She emphasized the word wouldn’t. Another step. She was within striking distance, now. The towel went up; a set of barbells, two castanets linked by fluffy, white lust, the arms and hands of a referee signaling, “TOUCHDOWN!”

Marvin closed his eyes and prayed.  

“Ms. Garcia! Where are you?” a booming voice demanded from the hallway.

He shot them back open.

“Madre de Dios!” Esmeralda whispered in shock.

No, just Major Jeremiah Forsythe, returned from his meeting with Madre de Dios’ son. Dios el mismo.

“Queeck, Marvin,” she said. “The window!”

 Marvin glanced over her shoulder to the far end of the shower room.

 “I’m naked!”

TEN

Esmeralda reacted first, moving in place like the vibration of a perfectly tuned and taut violin string until she snapped, which sent her flying in four directions at once. Her delicate arms and hands were a blur as they snatched the trousers, the boxers, the tee shirt and trench coat in a singular movement that would have made an electron blush with envy.

Marvin stood galvanized momentarily—in reality only a half second. He had no real fear of the Major, in fact, a disdain for him, but on the other hand he saw nothing pleasant in greeting a uniformed man six inches taller than himself, dressed like a newborn baby.  How would he shake his hand?

Esmeralda was at the narrow window by the time Marvin forgot his nakedness, raised his arms into the sprinters position, and dashed forward. She had the sash raised and the clothes and towel thrown out long before Marvin arrived shaking his head ferociously.

“No!” as softly as he could scream.

“Yes!” This uttered in a whisper, but with an emphatic movement of her lips that projected it as powerfully as a diva’s leap to the highest note. All the while her arms and hands were that locomotive blur, urging him on, and her face as stony-terrified as a statue on a sepulcher. The tension was infectious—even the little stick men’s faces on her gown were etched in terror.

The open window was little wider than a mouse door. God knows what lay outside. It could be dirt. It could be weeds. It could be a pile of broken liquor bottles. If that were not enough, the windowsill was four feet off the floor. Even at eighteen years old, a clean exit at full stride would have required months of training and a hundred stitches along the way. He stutter-stepped at three feet away.

Hail Mary, full'a…

And then he leapt.

Marvin cleared the sill in an Olympic diver’s pose; head lowered, arms outstretched and pointing, eyes closed tight at the last second.  He cleared the sill, with the half of him that ended at his stomach, that is. Physics demanded a higher velocity, a body knifing straight and level at mach 1. When he hit, there was a loud sound.  Air escaping from a punctured tire. A Phooomph! And a frightening paralysis as his lungs tried helplessly to obey the frantic messages from his brain to re-inflate.

Esmeralda reacted to Marvin’s tragic miscalculations as though she’d swallowed the mouse. The unexpected, the unthinkable, her Marvin laid out like a slab of uncooked bacon there on the edge of the frying pan. She quickly regained her composure and took hold of his ankles. With a grunt, she heaved upward and tossed him out, into the fire.

The window slid back down before he landed. 

He prepared himself in that split second as he tumbled head under heels and breathless, for impact. Jagged glass awaited him, at best. The remains of a weed, at worst, the thick stem hacked off six inches above the ground, ready to enter his back and pierce his heart.  Goodbye, cruel world.

Something quite unexpected happened instead.

He slowed, the gentle press of something that felt like fingers on his buttocks and back acting as a brake. More than the sensation of slowing, the electric-like tingling from whatever it was on his bare skin stunned him as surely as if he had fallen onto live wires. He opened his eyes, glancing to his right where the appendages and the jolt seemed to originate. What he saw shook him even more. For a fleeting instant the run of trees fifteen or twenty feet away at the property line melted into the emerging outline of a shimmering body, a mirage of luminescence shot through with gold. Marvin saw a face—the face of the creature who had visited him in the hospital— and in the face a myriad of eyes; sapphire and emerald and ebony, moving at random, independent. They danced and eddied as they peered down at Marvin, like dyes sprinkled in water, dissipating in ribbons swirling in its swift current. He might have mistaken them for a simple illusion of fright except for the length of sparkling dark hair falling down in the forward leaning of the creature’s torso. It was the same creature; there was no doubt in his mind, something ethereally real; the definitions of a face, the hair, the shoulders and broad, ivory-colored chest. But the most astonishing of all of it, this apparition, this—thing—had those enormous white wings that suddenly rose and spread as he lay Marvin down in the grass. It was him—or maybe her.

Oh Jesus, sweet Christ, it’s the angel again! I’m goin’ nuts!

He lay for a moment in the soft green, straining to make some sense of it, to comprehend the impossible, feeling the nerves in his body still racing from the touch of it. His eyes were locked on the angel, on Anselm, though he could know nothing of who this creature actually was, or what was really happening to him. 

The wings! Like those of a Peregrine or a Golden eagle.  Extended now. Perhaps this feature, this fluctuating, menacing possibility of power, mesmerized the naked man lying on his back in the grass most thoroughly.

Anselm shifted and spread them fully as he began to raise his head slowly away from Marvin. Marvin’s mouth fell open at the sight of the wings, and he drew in a deep convulsive breath as though it was the first of his life. He could see clearly, perfectly, in that second that lasted infinitely—the lights of Anselm’s eyes twinkling like bulbs on a Christmas tree, his lips forming words without sound.

The threads inside Marvin’s brain came alive as he stared.

Anselm at length began to back away, speaking through rushes of air between the two of them, speaking in threads, smiling. He rose upward as he left, a mist congealed into awe-filled form that passed through the branches of the trees and caused them to rustle and glow. And then he disappeared.

Jesus.

Marvin continued staring in a trance, that state of bewilderment of primeval man visited by gods in shadowy forests, or late at night in showers of meteors. The thread inside him began to squirm and coil relentlessly, and posit possibilities.  He felt its movement, eliciting a growing discomfort. Not exactly pain, more like an invasion of tiny, foreign insects. Ants crawling. Bees tracking busily inside the hive. 

These frantic little footsteps—the voice of the angel; the words he had spoken that had no sound, confusing, drawn from a vocabulary of a different universe.

 

 Marvin Fuster, what if…? 

 This is what you are to do... 

 Marvin Fuster, you will go...

 She is here, and we are watching her.

 Desire.  Imagination.  Faith.

 

Compressed, confusing but emphatic in their coiling, pricklingly intense grip.

Amy’s angelic face was intertwined in the lilting melody of prodding questions and instructions, wrapped by a dress of figures and motifs, something like Esmeralda’s, but colored instead with impossibly long and complex numbers, square roots, to-the-hundredth-powers, symbols…genetic code. Her image was there, walking in a black dress along a street in a far and distant land, orbited by the numbers, the words, helixes and light. Amy, the woman of a dream, was dressed in his youth, extending her hand toward him clearly now.

Through the window above him Marvin heard an exchange of indistinct words, and the threads vanished. He peered down at his naked body, and then rolled over. He gathered his clothes, such as they were, and slipped along the wall of the Mission to the alley to dress. As he pulled the foul-smelling trousers on, tugged the spotted tee shirt over his head, the creature’s words echoed. 

Here is what you will do. Here is where you will go…

Marvin took the first steps into his future, down the alley, in the direction of a neighborhood close by.