Free Vellum by Hal Duncan Page B

collected so many birth and death certificates, journals and photographs, newspaper clippings and suchlike, in all relating to perhaps a thousand different variants of what appears to be myself—or Jack, or Joey, or Thomas—so many and so varied that I think my poring over them has begun to blur the boundaries of what I was—what I am—and what I might have been. Perhaps I thought that I might find some pattern among the congruencies and dissonances, as if this whole journey had been laid out for me as a lesson by some greater power. I did work, for a while, on the theory that all souls travel such a journey, drifting through the worlds of other choices, other chances, so that, when they finally reach their destination, they should understand exactly who they are, by understanding who they’re not and why. Now, though…sometimes I get confused. I forget if this scrap of journal or that was written by myself or by some other Guy Reynard or Reynard Carter or whatever bloody name I was born with.

two
    THE WAR AGAINST ROMANCE
    The Journey of the Dead Man
    T he angel walks into Slab City off the Jornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead man, which runs north from Kern’s Gate, El Paso, through a dry plain of natron and uranium, salt, sand and dust, and the moment she looks up and sees him she just knows that he’s an angel, because, although she’s only fifteen and has never seen one of
them
before, one of what Finnan calls the unkin, she recognizes right away what she’s been taught to look out for, the particular kind of graving, the mark of their essence carved into them, into their words, their actions, their existence.

    Nearly everybody has some kind of graving in them, Finnan’s told her, because nearly every
thing
does. Every thing in the world has its true name, its name in the Cant, the unkin tongue, and humans are no different. It doesn’t have to be physical, although sometimes people wear it in their eyes or on their skin for everyone to see, a thousand-yard stare or a knife-scar or tattoo. But what makes it a graving, a name that you can read and maybe even use, is that it’s real close to the surface, some event has brought it out, a welt on the surface of reality. You get it for your own reason, if you ever get it at all; maybe you get it the first time you fuck, maybe the first time you kill, either way it’s your own special graving, it’s
you,
that secret name carved into your consciousness at that precise moment when you suddenly, instantly realize: I know what I am. Just a moment, just a day like any other, like today, April 12th, 2014. But what happens on that day marks you for the rest of your life, says Finnan, and maybe even longer.

    Of course she doesn’t have her graving yet, so she can’t really be sure he’s not just shitting her about it; first time he told her, in fact, she said so in her foulmouthed tomboy terminology. Except. Except since then Finnan has been teaching her to read those secret names, to read them in the squint of an eye, the set of a jaw, the hunch of a shoulder, a rap of a knuckle on a table. For most people it’s like a gambler’s tell, a little characteristic that gives away their whole hand, their whole game, but for some that mark is just a little bit more defining and a little bit more definite. They wear it like an aura and it flickers through the air around them, ahead of them even, turning heads when they walk into a room, hushing conversation. Nearly everybody has some kind of graving, all right. But not everyone has it graved so deep that it goes right down through them and under the skin of reality itself. Not everyone has the Cant.
    So she knows he’s an angel, all right. She knows he’s unkin. She could damn near
smell
him on the dead, desert air, even before he came into sight over the low brow of the Jesus Hill.

    He’s black; at first she thinks it’s just shadow, but,