Angel/ Derail
Behold now my brother hovering with his wings out grease stain on his pants not wearing a shirt strobe lights bouncing his chest, half dough, half marble, flexing in the light, making no move to wave back at me while I am made to spin around him in a slow circle before my monster-shaped car turns the corner and barrels through fake plywood doors that clatter shut behind me and then I am in hell, crepe paper flames wrapping around my wrist and a big hairy spider covered in thick dust falling from the ceiling onto my head like a sword.
Price of admission to see my brother: $7 + $5 funnel cake I did not eat, just held for something to hold. In the fairground wind, the confectioners sugar lifts like ghost fingers, pointing back at me. This is the last time we see each other, that summer after high school that I got ready for college and he leased his body to the amusement park haunted house ride because he looked good in wings. He worked in Hell, which is the ride that no one goes on unless they’re drunk and then everyone goes on. He represents grace or not accepting grace. His is the face of not taking Jesus into your heart. After you take a slow spin around him with his shirt off, you go down into the fiery pit.
I’m sorry for your loss
Once in college he called me in the middle of the night to tell me there was a species of butterfly that only six people had ever seen.
“Look it up,” he said, “google this shit, Chrysocalis Uniformis. And then he said “What if you saw something that no one else had ever seen before and you had to tell people about it?”
“It’s 2 am,” I said, when what I should have said is: I’ve seen you. I’ll tell them about you.
I know he was like a brother to you.
Behold my brother who came from a different family and so wasn’t really my brother. Here he is, age 10, his first day in our school, and his glasses match his shirt exactly, and he walks into the classroom, and I can see it already, the ricochet across the classroom boys: A, B, C. They shadowed him in that dangerous moment right after lunch.
When I tell this story, I like to tell it like this: I walked in and said stop it, and because I was a girl and also strong, they did, and we had lunch together.
But maybe what really happened is that I was another form of vulture, come to scavenge whatever was left because I needed a pet. I picked him up and told him his glasses were fine. And he became brother, following me around.
In my closet, in a box, there’s a picture of him in a sunflower field from a school field trip. This was before. He was smiling. For some reason, he was crouching in the field making a goofy smile, still so young that he was pretending to be an animal, maybe a lion or something. I think I remember taking that picture. The camera is a little tilted. Maybe from laughing.
He’s in a better place.
Hell is the ride in the section of the park that no one seems to go to, behind the kids’ roller coaster. When you stand in line for the ride, you can look at panels of oversaturated images: demons with big breasts and red nails, saints bleeding from the place where they were recently severed from heads, (at least you come out ahead, he said once), little blue and white bibles flying with dove wings just above everyone’s reach. There was a panel depicting limbo with souls all clumped together like putty. At eye level there was a drawing of a crowd looking skyward with dinner-plate eyes.
The ride is shaped like a labyrinth. My brother-as-angel hovered in the first room looking disappointed, which is the last thing you see before going down through hell, then limbo, then heaven, which is just a trick of strobe light in a roomful of mirrors tilted upwards so it looks like a prettier version of you is ascending. It smells like fog machine and like sweat and every single time it reminds me of the second last time I saw my brother, which was five years before, at the bar. The dyke bar was empty so I went to the other bar and there he was, shirt off, looking sad. There was no one for each other but us. We danced. We drank. We went back to my house and I fucked him with my strap on. We never really talked about it, except that he asked me to stop and I did and then he said: “you know how someone can change your life in five minutes?” and I asked him if he was talking about love and he said no and I didn’t ask him anything else because there was a crack in the ceiling that had my full attention.
The reason people pay for the ride is to visit Hell. For the part where the ride drops you with frittered cables past area heaters into a red hallway with screams and cackles and someone’s big booming voice going “you’re never getting out of here.”
It’s all part of the plan
Most haunted house rides are built like a pretzel. It looks like a straight line, but it loops and brings you back to the beginning.
I am building a scaffolding for this story. I am building a scaffolding for my memory.
If I conjure him right, I will be able to buy a ride and see him again in that room. My memory follows the path of that ride, which is painted black on the inside and welded together every summer by kids paid minimum wage and alcohol as if nothing could ever possibly go wrong. And you get one chance at redemption, which isn’t really anything if the angel won’t even look at you. Which is to say that sometimes, those rides burn down.
The year of my brother in Hell was the year that I went back to see the school we’d grown up in, the kind of thing you do in your twenties for no good reason. Maybe there was an English teacher I had to thank. Father Mounte (ha-ha!) was dead. I pictured him on a lily pad, ossifying into a stone frog, the kind you toss coins into the mouth of. In my dreams, I toss coins into his mouth until he bleeds down his cassock. In my dreams, I stuff his mouth with the taste of copper until he chokes. The other priest was still alive, in his office. He put down the pen he’d picked up to look like he still wrote things in pen and pretended to recognize me. I remember a sermon he gave once that ended “and all the faces in the world resolve to the face of Jesus.”
In my dreams all the faces in the world resolve to the face of my brother.
He was loved by all
Behold my brother at Nelson’s bar, which is where “everyone’ went on graduation night, he put his feet on the chair and got up standing on the bar, for no reason, no one did that, and the bartender was walking over to get him down, but something slowed the bartender down, and my brother was up there, with his signature taking his shirt off move, as if that’s where he belonged. The bartender stopped. Something knocked a beer down behind us. My brother took shirt off and danced and we all laughed, watching his feet dance above the table like he was held up by invisible wings.
It's ok to let go.
In school I went to confession because of a mixup. My parents were fighting and had neglected to write “Jewish” on the exemption form. And my protests on the day of were ignored. The feeling of dread. They opened a door in our school hallway we’d never seen before, which led to a stairway we’d also never seen before, and upstairs tiny rooms. I remember crossing paths with him in that hallway after, his face like wax melting. When I asked him,
“…,”
He, “/dialogue.”
But his amusement park wings were something, wide and translucent. On the phone he said that if you break the wings, you have to pay for them. Taking care of the wings was the serious part of the job. Two of the demons had to come around and unhook his wings, one on each side, and you could tell they were already tired of him.
There was a month when he called me almost every day. He wanted to talk about angels and butterflies and wings. Get this, he said, There’s a moth that smells like corpses for protection. There’s a caterpillar that only makes cocoons in glass. There’s a caterpillar that’s totally gay. And then he paused.
“Happy coming out day,” I said. “I’m gay too. Congratulations.”
“You’re lucky you got the right priest,” he said one time over the phone, which is where we could talk. Two disembodied voices like souls. The phone is the only place where you have a soul.
“They were both the wrong priests.”
On the playground, we were grim at age 11. The priest thing was an almost-joke. You knew that you didn’t get close to the priests. You just didn’t. It was safer in the all girls’ school with the nuns, but I blew that by falling in love with Laura, and then I was out of the all girl’s school and in a co-ed school, which is where I met him, before he got his wings.
I missed him. But every time he called, I just wanted to get off the phone. I didn’t want him to talk to me about butterflies. One time he called and I didn’t call him back.
Hell
This is what hell looks like in my dreams. It’s full of shopping carts, and the shopping carts are on fire. The handles and children’s seats bending red, ready to melt.
A booming voice asks over and over: what have you done.
Why are you here. What have you done.
And you answer and you answer and you answer
Until one day you say:
Nothing.
And that’s the right answer.
I heard that Hell burned down. The amusement park one, anyway. This was a long time ago. Built by college kids, so what do you expect.
“He’s with the angels,” Father Asswad said at his funeral.
I think of him behind the ride, his one earring, smoking a cigarette, demons on either side of him holding his wings.
I’ve never imagined life without him and so I don’t.
He’s there when I graduate. He’s there when I get married, buying me a drink. He’s here reading this. Hey wanker. How’s tricks?
It takes Time.
You could even say that the worst thing about the priests wasn’t their hands. It was asking us to believe in things that weren’t in front of us and telling us to think about forever. No child should have to think about forever. Forever is for memories. Forever loops like an amusement park ride, where you end up back to where you began.
We know forever because we had land lines that looped the past back into us.
You need this concept of forever to explain to someone who has only known cell phones what a landed phone looks like when it’s not ringing. There is nothing more dead.
I imagine it ringing.
Ring.
I do not pick it up.
Ring
I pick up and hear nothing on the other end.
Ring
I pick up and say I love you.
Ring
We have a lovely conversation in which we finally tell each other we’ll be here for each other forever, and I come visit him, and he’s totally happy and works for a bank in compliance or something.
There’s nothing you could have done, you know.
I pay my $7, money sticky with confectioners sugar.
I sit alone in a little car made for two and shaped like a monster. They tell us to keep our hands to ourselves. The buzzer goes off. My car rumbles under my seat as we cross two plywood doors. The first room is dark except for maniacal laughter actually written on the walls in goddamn neon: Ha. Ha. Ha. The second room takes you through a tour of all the vices. Gluttony has a mannequin of a man at a table eating spaghetti out of his own guts; pride is a skeleton in front of a mirror shaving down its skull with a nail file, sloth is a human puddle melting into its bed, and then we turn the corner, and here he is, my brother.
When the time comes, I ignore the rule that says you have to keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. I stand up. I lift him up by his legs and unhook him from the sky and sit him next to me, and when he struggles, I know enough just to wrap one arm around him. I’m right on time, not too soon, not too late, and when he gets his breath back, I tell him about a species of butterfly that has only one wing. It flies around in circles, but it flies forever. I tell him about a moth that has the face of Jesus on it, even though we don’t believe in Jesus. I tell him there’s a caterpillar that stays a caterpillar forever. I tell him that in the process of transformation, most caterpillars disintegrate completely, and that what emerges has nothing to do with the original. I tell him that even so, some butterflies fly all over the world and remember how to get home. I straighten his wings and put all our catholic school faith into believing this one thing, and this one time, he believes me.
Carson Ash Beker (they/them) is a hybrid storyteller and experience creator, co-founder of The Escapery Pirate Art Collective and Queer Cat Productions Theater Company. Their stories are upcoming or found in Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, Spunk, Foglifter, Gigantic Sequins, and on ships and in cemeteries and on stages across the bay area. They are proud to be a Lambda writer and a graduate of Clarion West 2018, and an associate editor at Pseudopod. They can be found at CarsonBeker.com; QueerCatProductions.com and at www.Escapery.org. They are most definitely haunted.