The Face

God’s sake!”
        [591] “It’ll be all right. Just sit down, Ethan.”
        “He’s bad, I’ve never seen him this bad.” Ethan heard in the hoarseness of his voice an emotion deeper and better than fear and anger: the raw and wrenching love for another human being that he’d not been sure he still had the capacity to feel. “There’s no strength in him to fight this time, he’s so weak.”
        “That’s the paralytic spray, but the effect is wearing off.”
        “Spray? What’re you talking about?”
        With one hand and with a gentle force greater than mere mortal strength, Dunny Whistler pressed Ethan backward with the boy in his arms, and guided him down onto the wet garden bench.
        Standing over them, a pale and somewhat haggard man in a fine suit, Dunny appeared to be nothing special, yet he walked through mirrors, transformed himself into parrots that flew themselves into doves, vanished into the ornaments of a Christmas tree.
        Ethan realized that his old friend’s suit remained dry in the rain, as did Dunny himself. The drizzle appeared to strike him but with no effect. No matter how intently Ethan stared, he could not see what happened to any drop that met Dunny’s suit and face, could not puzzle out the secret to the trick.
        When Dunny placed one hand on Fric’s head, the trapped breath exploded from the suffering boy’s lungs. Fric shuddered in Ethan’s arms, tipped his head back, and breathed, sucked cold air without inhibition, exhaled a pale plume of air with no asthmatic wheeze.
        Gazing up at Dunny-coma-thinned, waxy-looking Dunny-Ethan felt no less bewilderment than when, after being killed in traffic, he had found himself alive outside the door of Forever Roses. “What? How?”
        “Do you believe in angels, Ethan?”
        “Angels?”
        “The last night of my life,” Dunny said, “as I lay dying in the coma, I received a visitation. This spirit who calls himself Typhon.”
        [592] Ethan thought of Dr. O’Brien at Our Lady of Angels, earlier this same day. The DVD recording of Dunny’s brain waves. The inexplicable beta waves of a conscious, alert, and agitated person spiking across the screen when Dunny had been in a deep coma.
        “In the hours before my death,” Dunny continued, “Typhon came to me to reveal the fate of my best friend. That’s you, Ethan. In spite of the lost years between us and all the ways I went wrong, that’s still you. My friend… and Hannah’s husband. Typhon showed me when and where and how you would be murdered by Rolf Reynerd, in that black-and-white room with all the birds, and I was so afraid for you… and grieved for you.”
        At several points, the EEG had recorded a wildly spiking beta tracery that according to Dr. O’Brien represented the brain waves of a terrified individual. Subsets of beta had indicated conversation.
        Dunny said, “I was made an offer… was given the chance to… to be the guardian you needed these past two days. With the power granted to me for this short mission, I could among other things fold back time.”
        When a guy stands before you, saying he can turn back time, and you at once believe him, and you also accept with rapidly diminishing amazement that he remains dry in the rain, you have changed forever-and probably for the better, even though you feel as if the earth itself has been pulled out from under you, as if you have fallen into a rabbit hole deeper and stranger than Alice ever dreamed.
        “I decided to let you experience your death in Reynerd’s apartment, your scheduled destiny, then take you back to the moment before it happened. I figured to scare the shit out of you and give you the extra edge you were going to need to get through the rest of what was coming-and to get this boy through it.”
        Dunny smiled at Fric, and arched an eyebrow as though to suggest that he knew there was something the boy would want to say.
        [593] Still weak of body but once more quick of mind, Fric said to Ethan, “You’re probably surprised angels can say ‘shit.’ I was, too. But then, you know, it’s in the dictionary.”
        Ethan remembered a moment in the library with Fric, earlier this evening, when he had told the troubled boy that everyone liked him. Disbelieving, disconcerted, Fric in his enduring humility had been at a loss for words.
        On the library Christmas tree behind Fric, the angel ornaments had