The Oir

Josie Porpentine one day stared into the eyes of a St. Sebastian painting and came to the realization he must’ve died by suicide, and she became obsessed with proving it was true. She even conceived the whole elaborate arrow-shooting contraption he must’ve invented himself and set up to stage it all while tied to a pike. Josie was in college to be a forensic pathologist, and flights of fancy were counterproductive in such a fact-based discipline, but she couldn’t let the image go. To complete her matriculation as a forensic pathology major, she had to write a thesis with a comprehensive list of pieces of evidence in a legitimate murder scene and logical conclusions from adding them all together, imagining the murder hadn’t yet been solved, but that’s as far as imagination could or should go in her discipline. Still, she wanted to somehow prove the hypothesis that St. Sebastian used his arrow-shooting contraption to give himself the most dramatic martyrdom in some narrow-minded sibling-like competitiveness with his fellow saints. She compromised and convinced her professors to let her study an entirely hypothetical contemporary staged suicide and explore the question of whether or not such an elaborate staged suicide was even possible, comprehensively listing the evidence she might find when encountering such a scene. She called her hypothetical suicidee Sabastian, but she hesitated to reveal the true target of proof was the saint of the same name. She guessed they were all cynical, logical agnostics who’d be disinterested in her hagiographic fixation, but even if they were religious, proving that a martyr killed himself. She pressed on, undaunted by how poorly her fixation fit in any categories.

Her best friend was Angel Kamminer-Moorhead, the most famous musician on the planet and leader of so many nominal rock bands (Angel and the Bad Men and Angel and Angel and the Schadenfreude and Angel and the Manikin Salt Miners and Angel and the Nominal Bandmates) they became known as Angel and the Blank Band no matter what members they had. Angel, who knew Josie from that brief time she thought she’d be a normal college student instead of a rock star and randomly chose criminal justice, liked to call Josie on the phone and converse sometimes mundane things. If she couldn’t be a normal college student, at least she'd have a normal friend in college. Josie didn't care much about music and didn’t know much about celebrities or anything popular and didn’t fawn all over Angel, and Angel loved these little momentary, normal phone calls more than anything. Or normal for Josie and Angel. Angel would start their conversation with random trivia unrelated to anything rockstarlike. This was the last conversation they ever had: Angel said, "I just found out porcupines and echidnas are not related. Echidnas are from the family tachyglossidae.” She said the word slowly like she was reading it out of a book or off of a piece of paper she’d written it on. “But porcupines… get this: porcupines are from the family equidae."

Josie said, "Equidae are horses. Porcupines have a lot of different families -- hystricidae, octodontoidae -- but they're definitely not…” She laughed in a condescending other people might consider offensively condescending, but Angel thought might be a normal sort of friend derision. “They're definitely not horses last I checked."

Angel said, "Sorry, echidna and equidae kind of sound alike, and I wrote them down side by side to keep then straight, but it was even more confusing than never writing it down to begin with.”

Josie said, "I never much cared for horses. I know girls are supposed to love horses, but I never saw the appeal."

Angel said, "Oh. Well, I like horses." Silence. "Okay, bye now." That’s how a conversation with Angel Kamminer-Moorhead normally went. Mundane nonsense.

Josie found out later that Angel jumped off a bridge that same night.

Josie told news reporters who asked her about what could inspire a successful rock and roll musician like Angel Kamminer-Moorhead to jump off a bridge. "I think she was upset that I don't like horses."

"Could you explain what you mean, Ms. Porpentine?" the news reporter might say.

She said, "I realize it's unusual for girls to not like horses, but I never cared for them."

"Why do you think she was upset enough about this to commit suicide?" some of the more bold and astute observers might inquire.

"I don’t know any more than you do," Josie said. And that was it.

Others who tried to rationalize Josie's response would say, "Are you saying this was a sign of her mental instability?"

Josie would say, "I guess. But also I think the fact that I didn't like horses." Josie became disillusioned with news writing as an occupation.

Still, these two suicides, St. Sebastian’s and Angel Kamminer-Moorhead’s, led Josie to the Oirs.

Oirs come into existence when famous people committed suicide. Jerzy Kosinski’s suicide created a stone memorial to a war called the Opal Bean War with garbled non-names listed as the dead. Ian Curtis created a big red hole in the ground out of which alley cats emerged. Robin Williams created an island full of monsters. Marilyn Monroe created a disconnected wallpapered hallway several hundred miles long. Dean Cameron created snowscape composed of particulate vampires. And so on.

A rich lady called Missy Tone-Dodilay decided to philanthropize her money guilt away by mapping all the monstrous and arbitrary manifestations in the city as a tourist exploitation venture and started with the Oirs their city seemed to collect in greater number than any other city. Josie happened to see a pull-tab advertisement not long after Angel died: “Wanna make a little extra money cataloging the city’s Oirs? Explore the fascinating world of suicide in the most unique way possible.” Josie couldn’t resist.

Benny Babrydanus, the teen girl who was supposed to train Josie in Oir hunting, seemed to take little interest in the intricacies of Oir cataloguing or the philanthropic aim Missy Tone-Dodilay intended or pretended to intend. This is the first thing she said to Josie: "My favorite Oir is Budd Dwyer. It's so gross and depressing, I'm obsessed."

"Is he famous?"

"I think Budd is a senator. I’m on a first name basis with him at this point. If you spend a lot of time with Oirs, you start to develop this relationship. I’m sure museum people feel the same way about paintings.” Benny had this weird way of saying “relationship” like she was chewing on something bitter. “Anyway, Budd shot himself on live TV."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Because he was a senator, and he was gross. He was probably a lot more gross before he died and knew the best thing to do to move up in the world." She made a gun with two fingers, stuck them in her mouth, and thrust her head back with all gratuitous garbled onomatopoetics of a suicidal head wound. Benny continued: “The minute he did the deed, this Oir popped into existence in our city even though we have no connection to the dude. On the outside it looks like a big phone booth or one of those ATM cubicle annexes outside the bank except the walls look like they’re made of solid white puss or like it's covered in a membrane that could break if you touched it. Except you can't touch it because it's a landmark and they'd arrest you.”

“Who'd arrest you?”

“I don't know. Somebody. It's not my job to know how landmark laws work.”

“I thought that was part of our job.”

“We just find them. Whatever happens next, I don’t give a damn. Somebody set up cameras all around Budd Dwyer's Oir, and if you try to touch the membrane, the light turns red. They might set up the cameras for scientific purposes, and the light might indicate motion detection. I realized sometimes cameras that seem nefarious might be curious need cameras. The motion sensing makes sense because if you watch the Budd Dwyer Oir long you see these light flashes on the other side of the membrane. But there’s not an electrical outlet or any other source of power. Nobody has been able to figure out where they come from.”

“Are they able to look inside the box with x-ray or something like that?” Josie wished she knew the impressive equipment names and terminology to firmly position herself as Benny’s superior despite knowing nothing about this Oir, but she hadn't gotten far enough in forensics studies to drop a name more complicated than x-ray.

Benny said, “They don’t have any need for x-rays. Here’s the coolest thing about the Budd Dwyer Oir: you can go inside. There’s even a door with a door knob and everything.”

Josie said, “So what’s inside?” Benny smiled but didn't answer. She looked up and all around like somebody might overhear a secret Josie was asking her to tell. Josie pressed on: “I’m not a tourist. You can tell me.”

“Budd Dwyer is inside his own Oir,” Benny finally said.

“He’s alive inside his own box?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a ghost or a dead body or…?”

“More like his body.”

“Let me get this straight: Oirs appear after suicides. Budd Dwyer's body is inside his Our. So his body suddenly appeared inside this box when he shot himself? Did his other body disappear?”

“I don’t know,” she said and tried to suppress an inappropriate laugh, “but dead body is not exactly the most accurate thing to call it. He’s laying in the exact same position he died in. His eyes are always open and staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t exactly display the sort of eye movement a living person does, but you can’t look at them and call them totally dead eyes.”

“I’m learning a lot about the weird nature of dead bodies and the weird mistakes we make in observing them. You can’t tell by some ineffable quality of the eyes if somebody's alive or dead.”

“Well, the eyes are just my favorite part. There's plenty of other not-alive-or-dead type stuff. His nose is constantly gushing blood like when he died. I think the gunshot collapsed the nasal cavity.”

“Interesting,” Josie said, uncertain what to make of it. Benny made a cogent forensics observation about the nasal cavity, but in the service of an impossible and forensically inconsistent claim, the unceasing issue of blood continuing for years or decades or however long Budd Dwyer had been supposedly dead. The claim lacked even the base rationality necessary to refute it, to make any conclusive statement on what death even meant.

Benny saved her from having to respond: “Here’s the other thing: Budd Dwyer can talk. He can hold a whole conversation. Even though he’s on his back and his nose is gushing blood, he can still answer any question you ask. It comes out a little gurgly, but it still makes a lot of sense.”

Josie let this fact sit there a long time. “I mean…” she said though she didn’t have any dangling claim to modify. “What do you even say in a situation like that?” Josie said desperate to fill the silence with something, asking herself as much as she was asking Benny.

“Mostly normal conversations. How my day is going, that sort of thing. He’s a good listener.”

“Do you ask him about what happens after death?”

“Of course but he just mumbles something about Jesus. I think he only remembers his life, and he probably believed in Jesus when he was alive. I must confess that’s one reason I keep this secret. That’s all Christians need, this bleeding-to-death dude as proof of anything.”

They went to the alley to see the Oir which was exactly like the cubicle wound Josie pictured in her head. Benny waved at the mystery cameras and said, “Hi, fellas, me again.” She opened the door like it was her own walk-in closet and walked in. Josie hesitated a bit, examining the monument. A giant rectangular puss-filled wound is not the sort of thing one enters for the first time delightedly. She studied wounds like this in school, but she'd never seen one with ambient light behind it, and this made it seem inhuman though by all other indications this was a giant human wound, including subtle indications of pink veins inside the opaque. She wondered if there was skin under the puss or if this was the swollen skin of the dead man. She couldn’t hesitate too long since Benny was waiting inside the Oir for her. She could come back later and study the skin of the box longer if she could build up the gumption to do this in front of the mysterious watchers, but the insides would likely hold even more fascinating things to study.

She waved at whoever was on the other side of the camera like Benny had done but with half the degree of not-giving-a-damn. Whoever had the camera trained on this wound box expected something to happen or to make sense, but maybe they weren’t brave enough to come in person. Maybe they weren’t brave enough to open the door as Benny had so brazenly, and this thought gave Josie enough courage to open the door herself.

Budd Dwyer was prone inside the box as Benny described, eyes open, nose eternally gushing blood at the rate of a regular sink faucet, but Josie saw now the trough catching the blood that somebody must have added after the fact unless magic or nature or whatever force made the Oirs to begin with put it there. Otherwise, blood would have filled the chamber drowning everyone (except Budd Dwyer who was already dead).

Josie couldn't think of a good question to ask the undead corpse of Budd Dwyer. His eternally open eyes stared at her, and she only wanted to push those lids down like any decent person would do to a dead body, but at the same time she didn't want to touch him. She didn't want to touch the constant stream of nose blood. She wished Budd Dwyer had some insight to give her and Benny and everybody on death or the soul or God or eternity, but according to Benny he only knew what the living Budd Dwyer knew, and Josie had no interest in what the living Budd Dwyer knew. All she could think of was Angel Kamminer-Moorhead. She wanted to ask why she threw herself off the bridge, if it had anything to do with their last conversation, but Budd Dwyer wouldn't know anything about that. She said, "Do you know Angel Kamminer-Moorhead?"

Budd Dwyer said, "No," in a voice that was terrifying in its normalcy, like he was really just a dude relaxing inside a wound box and bleeding.

She asked him the question she wanted to ask Angel: "Why did you kill yourself?"

He said, "Because I was never good enough. Everything would be better without me." Josie remembered what Benny said about the story, how Budd Dwyer was a senator accused of some sort of crime who shot himself on live television instead of facing prosecution, and Josie's first impression, when she was being honest with herself, was how this must be Budd Dwyer's egomania. After all, he had a wife and kids and it turns out he wasn't even guilty of the crime. Who but an egomaniac makes such a dramatic and selfish exit from the living world? Josie wondered if this was just her false impression or if the corpse of Budd Dwyer had the ability or the necessity to lie.

Josie could think of no way to respond other than a polite “Okay.” She'd have to think about this a long time before she could come back with something more valuable to say. Meanwhile, Benny sat beside her with her eyes closed. She seemed to be listening to the sound of the blood flowing into the trough like somebody might listen to a babbling brook. Josie decided to do the same just for once, enjoy the small sound without ruining the moment with voices.

Josie and Benny wandered around the city looking for more Oirs, and Josie muttered to herself, “Did you die because I said I didn’t like horses?” as she wandered up and down the street as if this was the mantra that brought into magical visibility the Oir of Angel Kamminer-Moorhead. Benny had a working map of all the city’s Oirs, at least the one’s the tourist board identified as Oirs and not other arbitrary magical phenomena. Benny marked the map with random words like “the crown” and “the stag” and “Frankenstein” without any context, and Josie wondered if those could be Angel in the afterlife. It was a weird sort of forensics Josie would never run across in her forensics classes, to determine what someone’s spontaneously manifesting memorial might look like. Benny said there was no logical relationship between the Oir and the life or mind of the dead person, but Josie still hoped she could find some discernible pattern, something her forensics mind could piece together. Josie had some vague memory of Angel describing a Frankenstein puppet show she really loved, one where the monster was skinless. “The stag” could also be her. She remembered Angel sketching various hooved animals and biomorphs living together in harmony like the middle panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights (good thing she didn’t mention the whole horse situation back then). Angel used to talk about being princess when Josie became queen, even though they weren’t related. Any of these could be an after-death-message. Benny threw out Oir analysis in her Benny style, shooting down every attempt at reasoning. “The stag is a jewel encrusted stag straight out of the Ramayana, except it disappears if you get too close. That’s Helen Palmer who wrote ‘Fish Out of Water.’”

“I don’t know what that is. Is it a book about a stag who thinks it’s a fish?”

“No, but that sounds like a rad book. It has nothing to do with a stag. It’s all random.”

“Who is the Frankenstein?”

“Well, I just call it the Frankenstein for short, but it’s a pile of mixed up body parts sewn together, and that is Ray Combs who used to host Family Feud.”

“I’ve never heard of Family Feud, but I’m guessing it has nothing to do with Frankenstein or mixed up body parts, right?”

“You never heard of Family Feud?”

“I had a…weird childhood. How do you even know it’s Ray Combs? I should have asked a long time ago. How do you know anybody is anybody?”

“Well, with Ray Combs, I asked him. I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m Ray Combs. I hosted Family Feud.’ I took his word for it, but he could be lying. A lot of them were labeled before I even started working for the Foundation, so I can't tell you who discovered anything before I came around.”

“There must be some kind of logical connection to dismembered bodies in the history of Ray Whatshisname. Maybe you don’t know enough about him.”

“I’m not the one who never even heard of Family Feud.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“Don't worry about it. I was like that when I started this job.” She talked like some wise veteran, but how long could she have legally done this job?

“Well, I just think a little research would help all of us.”

Then Benny said, “If you’re so resistant to randomness, why do you want to ask your friend if she killed herself because you don’t like horses?”

“Because … I want to know for sure why she died.”

“Seems a little egomaniacal to assume your opinion was that important to her.”

“It’s not. I’m not egomaniacal. It’s a totally humble assumption.”

“How is that possible?”

“I’m a good person, and I’m not an egomaniac. It would be irrational to accuse a good person of egomania.”

“It would be irrational to say what you just said.”

Josie ignored Benny's pestering and stared at the Oir map and shuffled behind Benny as they went from physicalized suicide intensity to physicalized suicide intensity, using the sound of Benny’s overly big and buckle-heavy boots as guide to keep from tripping. Then suddenly she realized everything around was morning-bright, and Josie muttered out, “We must’ve walked all night or something.”

“No, we made it to the Chris Benoit.”

“I don’t … know…” she looked up slowly as she spoke and saw a black sun the size of a hot air balloon with a bright crown-like corona surrounding it. “Wow,” she said without intending to. “If I had a Oir, I’d want it look like that.” She meant to say if Angel Kamminer-Moorhead had a Oir, and she was surprised when “I” came out of her mouth instead.

They stared together for a long time at that bright black sun, and Benny picked that moment to converse about life plans: “I’ve been studying law and business and computer programming lately because I want to open up my own assisted suicide business. You see, you can program an AI to kill and still collect insurance. It’s a legal blind spot. As long as you can prove the AI freely chose to kill you, legally the insurance company can’t call that suicide, and the police can’t arrest a robot.”

“You plan to make suicide robots? How is the Oir going to help you?”

“I figure my clients will be rich people at first until technology advances and I can bring down the overhead, so I’m researching the suicide preferences of rich people.”

“You can really study such a thing in school?”

“Well, studying is more like a hypothetical at this point, but AI assisted suicide is the future.”

Josie’s little sister Milly stole a stone angel, with the help of her rock band cronies, the day Angel Kamminer-Moorhead died. Because all the metaphors were a little too obvious, they painted it green. At least this was the story Milly told Josie (who betrayed the “cause,” whatever that cause was, by studying forensics and supporting the secret police state). For all Josie knew, the angel was a plastic ornament or a plaster angel or no angel. Josie didn’t have to study forensics to know it was unlikely Milly could move a stone angel, no matter how many rock and roll cronies she bullied into helping her.

Milly Porpentine’s dream to be a rock and roll musician started with a girlhood Angel Kamminer-Moorhead fixation, but it was the same with every girl of Milly’s generation, the hairbrush mic in bathrooms and the broom guitar, the whole nine yards, but Milly was the only one who treated rock and roll as a substitute divinity. She told everybody she was a Satan worshipper, but her concept of Satan was the manifestation of the music she loved more than anything, the OM-like vibrations consolidating into distinct deities and into deep guttural ecstasies.

Josie figured out her new friend Angel was Milly’s favorite human way too late. She said, “I met that guitar player, what’s her name.”

“You can’t mean Angel Kamminer-Moorhead.”

“Why not?”

“She’s not a guitar player. She’s a rock star. You’d also be in love with her automatically because everybody is.”

“Um…okay. It wasn’t her then.”

It was Angel Kamminer-Moorhead, of course, even though she wasn’t certain that first time. She muttered “I met somebody… at school… who was taking guitar classes but said she had a song on the radio. I told her I didn’t listen to songs, and she thought that was funny for some reason.” But she was sorting through mail and putting dishes away and never actually looking at her sister. Still, the initial “it wasn’t her” became the closest Josie got to admitting she knew Angel Kamminer-Moorhead to her sister. The denial born from a panoply of sisterly impulses – shame suppressed rage at being corrected, reluctance to bring her sister more happiness than she was able to achieve, etc. – gave birth to later denials. Josie told herself rock and roll was only Milly’s hobby, a teen phase, why indulge it? Then it became shame she never mentioned it before. On and on. How could she ever confess after Angel Kamminer-Moorhead died “I knew your favorite person”? Furthermore, “I might have killed her.”

Milly Porpentine had anxiety nose bleeds until she learned to play guitar. Josie had to hold a red handkerchief over her little sister’s nose every time she said, “We’ll have to be around non-Porpentines this time.” She had difficulty tolerating anybody other than Porpentine family members. But when she learned to play guitar, Josie only had to frame the terrifying inevitability of non-family interaction as a rock concert and Milly over-compensated with rebel swagger (though Josie had the red rag ready just in case). Early in this therapy, Milly had to carry a guitar case or have her guitar slung over her back like a knight sabre to remain stable, but soon Josie succeeded by merely reminding Milly her guitar existed. Milly wore a Jimmy Havoc style half mask over her mouth in case her physiological rejection of society decided to return, and then the bleeding would be bleeding out of the bottom of a mask like some special effect she planned or maybe she sang so intensely her throat and mouth collapsed and it wasn’t a pathetic nerve condition. That was the main reason Josie went to so many concerts at first, when they were in front of five people in a bar she was too young to drink at and when the audiences grew to ten people and then to fifteen and then back down to ten and down to five and back up to ten where it stayed awhile (the same ten who mostly came to drink but soon started to sing along to mostly inaudible sounds as if they learned the pseudo lyrics like hypnotism). And so on.

She thought of those nose bleeds when she met Bud Dwyer in the Oir. She would never ever let Milly know this Oir existed.

In retrospect, Josie realized Milly had been dreaming her own Oirs into existence (if she ever ended up killing herself (which Josie would never let happen)). Milly used to dream her ribcage cracked open and roses grew out of her carcass. Milly woke up screaming the first time she had that dream and told Josie all about it, and any time she woke up screaming, Josie knew what dream she had. When she committed to a rock and roll intensity, the ribcage-rose-dream screaming stopped. Josie asked if she was still having the dream, and Josie said, “Yes, of course,” with a little smile on her face, like rock and roll helped her love her own predicted death a little more or at least enough to not let herself keep waking up in terror.

The Porpentine sisters grew up in a subterranean cult called the Porpentinines who advocated the preservation of life over all other values (toleration of pain, for example, was the most holy act), but then a splinter group of two thousand cultists decided to surface for the sake of liberation (they were groping about for some new central value, and liberation was as good as anything). They called themselves the Lemurians, supposedly a joke by one of the members with more surface world experience, but the other members didn’t get the irony because they literally lived in a cave their whole lives. They lived near a sheer cliff beside the ocean, and one hundred feet below were the rocky rapids upon which any falling body would be dashed to pieces.

This spot had one remarkable feature above all others: there actually was a body that did fall into the rocky waves below on the regular. It appeared in a bright circle in the sky, fell all the way down to the water, but when the Lemurians leaned over the edge, they saw no body below. This led the Lemurians to realize collectively this should be their religion.

Lemurian priests told the collected two thousand that there must be a bright circle below in the water that gave the eternally falling body direct entry to heaven.

One Lemurian asked a priest, “Why then do we delay in jumping in ourselves?” but the priest had no answer. There was no reason based on the logic of the scenario other than a cynical sense of self-preservation that made any living animal resist a leap off a sheer cliff.

So the Lemurian priest told his people, “You’ll have to search within yourself to discover the answer.”

Right away a quarter of the Lemurians ran right off the edge of cliff while another quarter leapt off over the next few days. They said goodbye to their loved ones who struggled to come up with good conclusions to their internal searches other than “Wouldn't you rather stay with us than enter heaven?” unconvincingly. This quarter of the Lemurians would shuffle over to the edge and shrug and sort of slump over and down the cliff edge.

The other half of the Lemurians took longer to meditate. They’d stand on the edge and stare over and say, “Dang, that’s high up.”

Josie had so many friends who jumped off the cliff. She beat one friend at checkers, and the friend said, “Oh well. I guess that’s it then.” And she jumped off the cliff.

Josie had no compelling reason not to jump off the cliff herself. She picked up little Milly who was in the middle of her afternoon nap and stood on the edge of the cliff listening to water below and the wind that nearly knocked her off the edge. That might have been better. She’d rather let the wind choose instead of remaining frozen at the edge forever. Then she saw somebody stuck on a cliff about fifteen feet below. She thought maybe it was one of her friends who tried to jump off and didn’t jump out far enough. She tried to hold her tears in without dropping Milly. She’d be embarrassed if a tear dropped on one of her friends, dead or alive. She put Milly down in the soft grass and leaned over the edge of the cliff to figure out which friend it was. Suddenly, the body squirmed, and she screamed, and she looked back at Milly in case the scream woke her up, but Milly was a heavy sleeper in those days before the rib-rose dreams. She looked over the edge again and squinted at the body below. It was a boy, but he didn’t seem familiar from this distance. He wasn’t dressed like anybody from the settlement. She had to go down there to figure out who he was and maybe save his life if it was even possible.

She went back to the settlement for some rope. The settlement was so devoid of people now, there were piles of supplies nobody would ever use, so she only had to rifle a little through the piles of detritus the dead left behind. She decided to tie Milly to little scrubby nearby tree but didn’t actually know how to tie a knot, so she wrapped Milly up a bunch of times and hoped that would be enough. She took the rest of the rope to the edge of the cliff but she had nothing to tie it to to climb down, so she left it there and decided to climb down without assistance. If she fell, as she wanted to do a minute ago anyway, maybe somebody would come along and see the rope and know somebody on the rock below needed saving. She could just imagine Milly waking up tied to a tree. As shoddily as Josie tied that knot, Milly was still hopefully too little to free herself. Maybe nobody would be left in the settlement who valued life enough to set her free. Maybe the process of freeing herself would make her a stronger girl, strong enough to never need that cliff.

The boy or the man, it was hard to tell his age, told Josie as she got closer climbing down, "My name is Conor Clapton. I've been jumping out of that hole in the sky as long as I can remember."

When she dropped down to the mini-cliff, she looked around and saw other bodies and body parts. They seemed to all belong to Conor Clapton though a few of the bodies seemed to be wearing clothes like her settlement friends. Nobody from above had ever been able to see these bodies, obscured by the sea mist which only just happened to blow away in that moment Josie looked down.

Josie said, "I'm here to save you, Conor Clapton. You no longer need to jump anywhere. You can live with me and my sister now." But he resisted her pull. He seemed terrified by her attempt to save him or terrified by something else entirely. Josie didn't have long to contemplate, and she didn't have room to drag him very far. His resistance and Josie’s limited physical or psychological capacity for heroism caused him to slip off the little cliff. Josie still held him, but the grip of her other hand on the cliff started to slip with the boy/man's weight pulling against her. She let go. She had to think of her sister. No one would be there for her sister if she just let herself fall. She watched Conor Clapton disappear below in the sea mist. His eyes had the same terror as before but they also seemed happy in fulfilling his mysterious purpose.

Josie finally found Angel's Oir in a back alley in the city where nobody ever went. It was a chandelier made of luminescent pink hands made of glass, a special kind of glass that made a bell-tinkle sound when they lightly hit each other. They were layered one over the other like a dangling flower, but they weighed so little they blew in the wind. They seemed to go all the way up into the sky, but the top was obscured by a fog the texture of sea mist. Josie took Milly to see it. She wanted to ask her questions like whether seeing this made her feel any better about Angel. She knew it didn't, so she had no real reason to ask. Instead, she put her arm around her sister's shoulder. Normally, Milly tried to shake her off as if even this simple act of affection was too overprotective, but now she just let it happen. She let Josie hold her again, and she let the bells ring in the darkness.