Circuit Of Heaven by Dennis Danvers

my daughter anymore.”
    She’d kept her mother’s picture on the mantel in their bedroom. He’d wake up and find her sitting up in bed staring at it in the flickering light. The note she left him was taped to the mantelpiece. The ashes of her mother’s photograph fluttered on the coals. He laid the one page letter over them and watched it burst into flames, then moved all his stuff to the bedroom down the hall.
    Like he’d told Justine, he didn’t want to find Rosalind. He knew where she was, exactly how she’d gotten there, still had nightmares where he saw her in the flames. He knew the precise path to take if he wanted to follow her. It was the same path that led to Justine. He looked out at the dark night. The glow of the crematorium was long behind him. Flashes of lightning glowed and died. Barely audible over the sound of the train was the rumble of distant thunder. Rain hissed against the glass. It was as if he could still hear the roar of the incinerator, Jonathan whispering, “Souls.”
    NORTHSIDE STATION WAS ONLY FOUR BLOCKS FROM NEMO’S house, but he had to cut around a pack of wild dogs and ended up going ten blocks to get home. He was in no hurry. The rain had stopped, and the sky was clearing, the moon hanging overhead. He wasn’t ready to go home, but there was no place else to go.
    Justine hadn’t had it quite right about him and Rosalind. They were never really that close. They’d seen death together, and they were both terrified. But they’d made different things of their visions. Hers led her into the Bin, just as Nemo’s seemed to keep him out.
    Whenever he thought of going in, which he did more often than he admitted to anyone, he heard the roar of that fire, and it felt like a warning, a cryptic message from the gods. It was like the story of Oedipus Lawrence had told him. Like Oedipus, he didn’t know enough to understand what he should do, or even to understand what he was being warned against. He knew that every one of those people he saw consumed lived on in the Bin, never having to face death again, that in a sense they hadn’t really died at all, and it made perfect sense to follow them. And he knew that if he didn’t, he could very well live his whole life out here and die, and still not understand the roar of that fire, still not understand what the gods were trying to say to him—because maybe there weren’t any gods to be understood. But if there weren’t, what was the point of conquering death? What was the point of anything?
    AS HE CAME UP HIS FRONT STEPS , HE WAS LOST IN THESE thoughts. Otherwise he would’ve noticed the squeak of the porch swing or the shadow of a man in the moonlight.
    He bent over the front door lock and fumbled with his keys in the darkness. He’d just found the keyhole when an unfamiliar voice said, “Good evening, Nemo,” and he jumped, his keys falling to the porch with a clatter.
    He peered into the darkness and made out the shape of a tall, rail-thin man, his long legs stretched out in front of him, swinging back and forth in the swing as if the wind blew him. “Do I know you?” Nemo asked.
    “I’m a friend of Peter’s,” he said. “Rosalind’s father. He said you were a young man of strong convictions and feelings, particularly about the evils of the Bin.”
    Nemo had sounded off to Peter the night Rosalind had gone in. Nemo’d been about halfway crazy, and Peter had been there for years. No telling what he’d told this guy. “So who’re you? And why’re you on my porch in the middle of the night?”
    “Call me Gabriel. I was waiting for you.”
    “Did you talk to Lawrence? Did he tell you to wait?”
    “Lawrence. That would be your Construct.”
    Nemo caught the superior sneer in his tone. “Caretaker. Now why don’t you tell me what the fuck you’re doing here, so I can go to bed.”
    “Fair enough.” The man stood up. He seemed nearly as tall as Lawrence, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty