Better Angels Read Online Free PDF

death.
    “I must be drunker than I thought,” he said with a laugh, “to be thinking things like this.”
    Thinking of Jacinta, however, he grew more somber. Tonight was the tenth anniversary of her disappearance. It was probably all too reasonable to conclude that she must be dead, by now.
    At the thought of her death, however, Paul was never able to cry—at least not while he was awake. He had never cried for her, yet, whenever he thought deeply of her, he somehow always found himself on the verge of tears. He told himself it was all too deep for tears, yet he feared the tears might be too deep for him—that, once he allowed himself to cry, he’d never be able to stop, that it would break down the dam he’d built in his soul and overwhelm his small sanity in the flood of his grief.
    Since Jacinta’s disappearance, he had “gone on” with his life, but differently. His destiny had gone awry, like a Jesus who wakes up to find he’s thirty-four and has somehow missed the crucifixion. Jacinta would understand about messiahs gone awry, he thought.
    Paul didn’t know if there was quite enough of himself left over to cover up the hole in the universe Jacinta’s going had left behind. He had returned to the area near Caracamuni three years back, hoping to find a spot in space and time for mourning his loss, but the mountain he knew was gone, vanished. Space and time couldn’t fill the void.
    He felt so full of emptiness. He did not know if he went on rushing into nothing, or if nothing went on rushing into him. He did know, however, that the only things that stood against the dark tide were his memories, bright shadows cast inside the stone bubble of his skull, soft-tissued fossils that refused to die.
    He looked at the empty bottle and wished it were a loaded gun.
    A nearby unsteady alteration in the steady constellations caught his eye and he glanced toward it. As he stared, he saw a shifting—like the bending of light in water, a rippling piece of the night sky—coming toward him. Constellations are hallucinations turned into explanations by tradition and education, he thought with a giddy drunken flourish.
    But no. He stood up slowly, watching more carefully whatever it was that was approaching. His heart pounded and he thought irrationally of Jacinta returning.
    The shifting piece of the sky was almost on top of him before it stopped, a droning whisper of engines whirring in the moonlight close above him. A bright light flashed onto the ground near him, then probed toward him.
    Aw Jeez, Paul thought, I’m not drunk enough to be abducted by aliens.
    Something like a cross between a gangplank and a jetway extended downward into the cone of light, toward him. Amazed, he lost his grip on the empty Edradour bottle. It slipped from his hands and fell to the sand.
    “Hello, Dr. Larkin!” said an amplified voice. “Please come aboard!”
    Paul reached up and touched a safety rail, just to make sure this was all real. At least it felt real. He began to step upward into whatever kind of craft it was that was hovering above him.
    Two thirds of the way up the incline, the pluperfectly perky Ms. Griego, the venture capital agent, stood waiting on a step, beaming a smile of considerable wattage at him, above a midnight blue dress of a cut and style that might well have suited a stewardess aboard a low-altitude, high-speed, deep-penetration bomber of the 1960s.
    “Congrats, Paul!” Athena Griego said, shaking his hand vigorously and practically hauling him up the last third of the incline. “Dr. Vang is so interested in your fungus’s possibilities he’s come to speak with you himself!”
    Paul was bedazzled by more than just the sudden brightness of the light. The craft he had boarded seemed solid enough, yet also airy and diaphanous, as if the Great Airship of 1887 and the flying saucers of the second half of the twentieth century had met and mated, to produce this craft as their offspring.
    “What is this