Letting down her hair with a windrushing sound, the Angel of Forgetting overflew continents of surviving plaster. She strode the pillared yard of palms, click-heeled corridors roofed only with marbled sky. The little boy walked behind her, whimpering. Grass and weeds grew atop the jagged wall-ends.
In the room of gravel and moss, the Angel of Forgetting knocked down walls to let wind and birds in. She was being kind.
The little boy said: Don't you know me?
The Angel of Forgetting smelled a memory somewhere, like a pattern of a few dozen tiles. Sniffing, she raised her arms, swam the sea of graffiti-waved grayness, marched down narrow streets sunken like dry cobblestoned canals. Some rooms were hollowed out to store water or oil or grain, each opening being an upturned bowl with a ring around its hole, so that the darkness inside widened like a woman's breast. The little boy didn't follow. He stayed in his house.
Ah, ah, she said. Here it is. Here's the heart that needs to bleed!
She'd found the House of the Deer, in whose ultramarine violet sky of tiles golden-brown greyhounds leaped up at fleeing deer. Wreaths of leaves writhed like banners across heaven, and twin peacocks lived above.
She swept her hair across the tiles, and they faded. Slamming her heel down, she made thunder and the walls fell down.
Then she returned to the little boy's house.
The little boy sat looking at her in the pale-tiled rib-roofed chamber of echoes, sitting on his dolphin-tiled floor.
The little boy said: Don't you know me?
The Angel of Forgetting said: I'm not your mother.
The little boy said: I'm the Angel of Death. I lived in this house.
She shrieked, flew up, and ran along the many low ridges of various curvatures which hunched gray and yellow against time. Her wings fell off. She ran under the wall's narrowing archy darkness, that smell of sand in her face; she was sand in the little boy's hourglass.
The little boy, whose cheeks were burned purple by the Angel of Forgetting's death, kept twisting around to look at the woman who was getting off the train. He said: Don't you know me?
She replied: I lived in your house.
He said: I'm the Angel of Death. I lived in all the houses.
She said: You can't kill me, because I know you. Besides, I don't believe in angels.
The little boy started crying, but she said: You always do that. That's why I left. I got tired of your crying. Why don't you go kill someone?
Why don't you know me? he sobbed.
I do know you, she said. I died in all the houses. You never killed anybody but me. I'm your mother, and you were born dead.
The little boy stopped crying. He grasped the woman's sleeve. He said: Who built the houses, Mommy?
Your father did. He wants you to come upstairs. He has a new house for you now.
Then she shoved the little boy down, knelt upon his chest and strangled him. He squirmed and choked for a long time before he died.
Did you hear that? said the Angel of Forgetting from upstairs. — Ah, that pretty little bird!
Down in the golden grass near San Diego where houses and new houses terrified me, families lived the California life, saying to one another: If you can't feel it, never mind it. — A black lizard crawled and stopped. He heard what they said, and wanted everything to be true. Like ants on rocks, bees among thorns, flies and then rocks, grass-shadowed rocks, the houses went on forever.
If only I could blow up the aqueduct, I said. Maybe that would stop them.
The lizard crawled and stopped. He heard me before I heard myself.
In the desert I hear the clink of climbing gear or the clink of rock before I hear the sloosh of water in my canteen. I never hear my own voice.
The lizard heard and didn't hear. He heard desert birds talking to each other in long bright monosyllables.
Tomorrow I must die a little for your joy, the lizard said. He didn't hear his own voice.
Every time's a little drier than I remembered, I said. I didn't hear my own voice.
We both heard the slow double-beat of eagle wings.
The eagle saw cacti dead one day, green and blossoming the next. The eagle followed clouds like the branch-widening shadows of trees on narrowing rocks.
The gray dirt is covered with golden flowers, said the eagle. He didn't hear his own voice.
My, voice was a bitter salad of Joshua tree flowers. The lizard's voice was a man's legs warmed by the sun through dark trousers. The eagle's voice was a long day.
