I Can't Hang

“No,” I whimpered.

“Brady…” James whispered.

It was like the world just got totally knocked outta orbit. Like some big old meteor came and smacked it outta the gravitational pull of the sun, and it took all the wind outta me. That invisible rope from before came back and wrapped around my chest. My breaths came in short little wheezes.

I dropped Brady’s dead hand.

“We…we could get him back. If we try hard enough. We can…do you know CPR?” James stammered, panicking. His hands were shaking and everything, and he was looking me in the eye one minute and then staring at the wound the next second. “There’s a way to get him back. Maybe.”

I didn’t speak up. I couldn’t.

“His soul can’t be dead. It just can’t be. No.” He just kept going on like that, running his fingers all up in his hair and all that jazz, tugging at the trim of his shirt. “If it is, then we’re done. Oh my gosh…”

It was so crazily surreal to see him not moving a bit. He was always doing something. Twitching, playing with his hair or some crap. And yet there he was in front of me, dead as a sack of fucking potatoes.

“This is it,” he continued. “He’s gone. Gone.”

And I started crying some more.

It was even worse than any kinda cry that I ever did before. Worse than the kind at the hotel, worse than when he was still kind of alive a few minutes before. My tears were almost all used up and I was drawing on the any of the moisture left in my body, which hurt like hell when I dug it up. My face was already sticky and red from earlier with the blood combined with the tears. It was so nasty. I had snot and everything, too.

After a few minutes I just ended up sitting there, sobbing my damn heart out with my face in the sleeves of my hoodie, trying to muster up all of the excess water in my body to possibly create more crying. It hurt so fuckin’ bad. It was like dry heaving. Trying to produce something ‘cause you’re sick in one way or another, and nothing coming out.

James walked over to my side of Brady’s soul’s corpse and kind of awkwardly put his hand on my arm.

“At least he doesn’t have to go to Hell,” he sorta mumbled.

I calmed myself down. I wasn’t shaking like before and I wasn’t sobbing like a kid who got lost in a supermarket. It took a little while, but I managed it. My sleeves were soaked with snot and blood and a few tears, and every hair on my body stood on goosebumps.

“I didn’t hate him,” I spoke, finally.

James looked at me funny with his eyebrows pinched in that distinctive face he did whenever he thought somebody was insane. I couldn’t tell if it was because of what I said or the fact that I was actually talking.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

My heart beat funny. It felt like I almost blacked out for a moment, but I kept a grip on what was going on.

“I mean…I didn’t hate him.” I stared at Brady the whole time. “I don’t think I ever really did, y’know?”

I don’t think he understood, and I’m not totally sure I did either, but he nodded along anyway.

I bit my lip so hard it went numb. My eyes stung with oncoming water even though I thought I’d already gotten rid of all of it. I wasn’t even looking at him anymore – I was staring at the floor of the rooftop.

“I never did. He was…”

I cut myself off. I didn’t want a half-stranger hearing something I might not have wanted him to hear.

“…The first angel you met?” he finished anyway, staring at me.

“The only angel I met,” I grumbled. It was sorta cool how he didn’t point out how he was an angel too, actually. “First and last.”

The wind picked up and blew a sharp mist over the crumbling city. Then it stopped. My fingers grew warm and I could mute out the sirens and disastrous chaos happening in the distance.

“I cared about him. Kind of a lot.” I said my words low. Quiet. If I spoke any louder I’d have burst into tears again. Thought that technique didn’t really help since as soon as the last word rolled off my tongue, a fat tear slid down my cheek.

James swung his arm around my shoulder gently and pulled me close to him.

“And it’s not fair,” I choked out. “Nothing is.”

And he stayed silent. Didn’t mutter a peep.

But I pushed his arm away and stood up, feeling the cement crunch under the palms of my aching hands as I went upright. My knees shook madly and my feet were sore, but it beat sitting down by a long shot. First thing I did when I stood up was kick at the pathetic rooftop with no purpose. Just for the sake of kicking something.

“Why the hell did any of this happen, anyway?” I went on.

James was still on his ass, staring up at me with big old doe eyes.

“Shouldn’t have been me who got hit by that stupid car. Should’ve been someone else. Someone who wouldn’t prompt the angels and demons to destroy my fucking hometown. Someone who’d actually do something good for Heaven instead of pissing God off. I should’a gone to Hell in the first place, anyway.”

He shook his head, but didn’t speak up.

I looked down and over at him and kinda smirked on a whim. “That’s right. You weren’t here for that whole ‘my life isn’t fair’ speech I gave to Brady, were you? Nope. Well, I guess I’ll give you the short version. The kind that applies to what the hell’s going on right here and right now.”

When I bent down and got all up in his face, he gave me a funny look again.

“Point is, life sucks!” I swung my hands up in the air, turning around. “Every time you start to like something, or even get neutral toward it, it just gets fucked up and you never see it again. Everyone dies. Even angels die. I just saw it happen with my own eyes. Your damn hometown gets destroyed. Everything you ever knew blows up in your face and you look like a moron in front of a whole new world.”

I glanced at him over my shoulder.

“And it’s not fair.”

“I know it’s not,” he agreed. “I mean…I didn’t want him to go.”

I gulped down a huge lump. “Neither did I.”

“He was a nice guy.”

“I know.”

“He was brave.”

“Yeah.”

We weaved our way through a silence.

“You know what, James?” I asked finally, hearing my voice confident.

He snapped his head back at me. “Huh?”

“I think this is all bullshit.”

He cocked his brow. “Could you explain?”

I turned back toward the skyline and leaned against the lip of the rooftop. “There’s a part of me that still thinks I’m in a coma in a hospital bed and I’m dreamin’ all of this up. Part of me thinks God don’t exist. And that you and Brady were real people and all, but once you died you were dead and rotting in the ground. And the other part of me thinks this is all real and everything and that I was being stupid and should just apologize and ask for another chance. But I think both sides are wrong and I think everything I just went through is a load of bullshit.”

“How is it not real if you’ve spent weeks in your afterlife? And how is repenting bad?” James urged. He got up on his own two feet too, standing next to me after walking over.

I shrugged. “It’s all pointless. I wouldn’t mind just dying right here and now and getting it all over with. I’d rather never think again than spend a supposed eternity in Hell.”

“Wouldn’t you want to at least try to ask for forgiveness?” he pushed. A look of puzzlement swept across his face.

“It won’t do anything. Look what happened.” I threw my hand out in the direction of the still-raging battle between angels and demons. “They’ll never forgive me,” I said in a slightly lower voice.

“As long as you’re sincere and true, and as long as the angels keep up the fight out there…”

I opened my mouth but no words came out. All that I ended up doing was sighing.

“Why do you think They gave you a second chance in the first place?” James suggested. “You had a good soul. They knew that. They’d rather you be shaken up a little bit by a new discovery than be thrown in Hell for eternity.”

I leaned forward and put my weight on the lip.

“They love you no matter what.”

“Then why’d They throw me out? Huh?”

“Because…” he trailed off. Behind him, Brady was still lying dead on the roof, and he pointed to him. “Like he said. You gave up your chances.”

“Then what makes you think God’ll forgive me?”

James cocked his head. With a stern look in his eyes, he looked me square in the face. “Kyle, do you regret what you did?”

I snickered. “Be specific. I just did a ton of crap.”

“Then everything. Do you regret doing everything?”

I nodded. Slowly at first, but faster.

“Do you want to be an angel?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You guess.”

“Well, I wanna be one,” I told him. “I guess I don’t have high hopes right now, though. I had my wings for a day and then they got ripped off. I didn’t get the experience, really. I didn’t even learn how to fly.”

“That makes it even more worthwhile,” he smiled. “You have to want it. You have to truly be pure and honest, and then when you pray for forgiveness it’ll be fine.”

I stood there for a second, just blankly staring at the kid. “You know…what makes you the authority for all this?”

He licked his lips, looking a bit taken aback. “I was born and raised Catholic. And when I died, I met people from all different religions or lack of religion and all walks of life – they taught me what I know about being a good person, separate from whoever you pray to, and even if you don’t pray to anybody.”

“And you kept that faith all your life?” I shook my head. “Damn. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t.”

“I kept it, yeah. I did…even when I was in bed, dying,” he mumbled, averting my eyes. He chewed on his cheek.

Something slammed into my brain at that moment. All of a sudden, I realized it – I didn’t know this kid for a hole in the ground. I didn’t know his last name, I didn’t know how he died, I didn’t know what his family was like, I didn’t know who he wanted to be or what he wanted to achieve. I didn’t know anything about him. And yet, for some reason I felt closer to him than I ever had before.

“How’d you die?” I whispered. I could have understood if he didn’t wanna answer that, but I was curious anyway. Now was as good a time as ever.

He glanced back up at me but then looked down again. “A…a fever.”

“Oh.”

“Every night they prayed for me,” he went on. “They’d sit by my bed and pray. My family, I mean. My mom and dad and sister.”

“You had a sister?”

He nodded, but didn’t add anything else. Instead, he choked back tears, staring off at the traffic moving out of Manhattan. A couple more questions surfaced in my head after hearing him say it, but I didn’t wanna be rude.

“Brady was an orphan,” he said after a minute of silence.

“You knew too?”

He glowed; his smile was on fire. “I was dead for fifty-two years. I got around a lot. And still…I didn’t really know a lot of people, but I knew who Brady was.”

All of the souls in Heaven. Billions of them – and still…Brady stood out? People knew who he was? I mean, back when I first died and got my wings, and that lady was saying how active he was…that threw me a little bit. He never struck me as a real popular guy.

“Not many people really talked to him, though,” James negated. “I don’t think I ever saw him hang out with anyone. I didn’t, either, though, so…yeah.”

“But I guess you two both worked hard in Heaven anyway,” I said. “You brought all those souls up and everything.”

He kinda laughed. “You know what’s sad? It’s ‘cause we didn’t have anything else to do with our eternity of time.”

“But…God already let you into Heaven, and you did all of that anyway.”

“Yeah. Funny how that happens.”

Thoughts were rolling around in my head, giving me another headache.

“Do you wanna give a little prayer a try?” he suggested, nudging my elbow softly.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

“It can’t hurt. Really, it can’t.”

“But…” I hesitated. The last time I prayed had to be at least ten years ago.

He blinked a few times, waiting for a decision. “You’ve got nothing to lose. This time, it’s for real. You said you didn’t have anything to lose when I dropped you off here in the city, and now it’s true times a thousand.”

I meant everything I said. I did wanna be forgiven. I did wanna be an angel. I did want everything to be back the way it was. I wanted a fresh start, I wanted Brady by my side, and I wanted Them to help me and forgive me for falling from the New York skyline. So what if I went against everything I ever stood for when I was alive?

A surge of power swept through my body, and I don’t even know what it was to this day.

I turned to James and said, “I’ll do it.”

He just looked at me and beamed.