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The first time Emmanuel lays his hands on someone and works a miracle, he sees a brief flash of someone splayed back against his retinas, and the feeling that he has misplaced something itches at him for hours. They drop the drifter off at a hospital in Pueblo, and even though the young woman, no longer crippled, is beaming as she waves goodbye, Emmanuel himself cannot help but feel lost, adrift.
They are driving down an empty stretch of Highway 50, Daphne at the wheel, Emmanuel planted in the passenger seat, hands folded. It’s a comfortable posture, a familiar one. The heavy curtains that seem to partition his current life from whatever lay before hang stiffly across the breadth of his mind.
“What is it?” Daphne asks. She’s a bit breathless, which Emmanuel supposes makes some sense. She has just seen the strange man she has dedicated herself to fix broken bones with the mere touch of a finger. As devout as she is, a miracle is a miracle for a reason; they are infrequent, inexplicable, faith-trying for even those most committed to holiness. Humans are used to separating the divine from the mundane. Any overlap, any blurring of the line, begs serious questioning.
Not for the first time in Emmanuel’s short reborn life, he vaguely wonders as to why humans seem to be other to him. The distinction seems natural. He hopes it is not arrogance, pride bubbled up from the unusual circumstances of his existence.
“I…I don’t know,” Emmanuel finally answers. He studies the Colorado regolith, dry and dreary, rolling by evenly outside the window. “When I healed that woman, I thought I saw something.”
Daphne glances over, sweet, concern painted across her features. “What sort of something?”
“A…person.” Emmanuel replies. “A man.”
“A man?”
“Yes,” Emmanuel chuckles. “Short hair, I think? Green eyes?” He certainly remembers those eyes, bright and hard-edged, glinting against the murky backdrop of his mind.
“Who do you think it could be?”
The first signs of civilization emerge as they crest a small hill; the outskirts of Daphne’s hometown. The buildings of Fowler are small, crouching as if to brace themselves against the unforgiving gales hurled from the peaks of the Rockies. Emmanuel supposes that this hard-scrabble little place is his home now, too.
“Someone from my past life? From before we found each other?” he says haltingly after a moment of consideration. It feels like a complete shot in the dark. Daphne smiles, just for an instant. It’s a gentle, crooked thing. It’s not a mouth that smiles easy, but it feels familiar and Emmanuel is drawn to it.
“If you try,” Daphne is saying, and Emmanuel forces himself to focus, “if you really focus on your past, do you think you’d be able to remember this person?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
Daphne turns to him, her smile gone. The car swerves a bit in the lane. Emmanuel nods towards the road, and Daphne sighs and tightens her grip on the wheel. The car straightens. “Why not?” she asks.
“I forgot for a reason, didn’t I? I was delivered to you knowing no one, having nothing, not even clothes on my back, for a reason. Maybe I’m supposed to just,” he waves the hand he used to restore the drifter’s shattered bone in the air at nothing in particular, “rebuild.”
“Could be true,” Daphne says. She aims the car towards the turn lane. “But maybe having an inkling at what came before might help guide you towards your higher calling now.”
Emmanuel shrugs appreciatively at that. He places his hands in his lap, closes his eyes, and nuzzles back against the seat cushion as far as he can. He thinks of the hazy afterimage of the man with the green eyes, hovering specter-like at the very corner of his memory, and concentrates. The more Emmanuel thinks about him, the more the man’s features seem to melt into the mist. Soon he can’t remember the shape of the man’s face or the cut of his hair at all.
“It’s no use,” he reports, opening his eyes. He is surprised; somehow, his meditation lasted long enough to spirit them all the way to the end of Daphne’s street. They are nearly home.
“I have another theory,” Daphne says.
“What’s that?”
“Well, you just worked a miracle. Maybe, just for a second, you looked upon the face of God.”
Emmanuel laughs for a moment at the sheer boldness of her claim, but he can come up with no better guesses himself. Maybe the green-eyed man, of which now he can only just see those eyes staring back at him through his mental recalcitrance, is grace itself, the divine somehow made incarnate, some reaction to Emmanuel leaning on heavenly energy to perform miracles. The thought is oddly settling.
There is never a rational explanation for how Emmanuel knows where to go for his work, or how exactly he makes it there. There is always that sudden itch, something primal, a little kernel lodged deep in the root of his throat that urges him out of bed, or up from the dinner table, or away from his flowerbeds, and then in a moment of dizziness, he finds himself at the stoop of someone who needs his help. Sometimes, if he senses the miracle can be performed nearby, Daphne and Emmanuel will go together, will pack themselves into her old, stuffy Toyota, and trundle down the freeway or the backroads of the eastern Colorado steppe or just down the block until the itch stuffed into Emmanuel’s brainstem explodes into fireworks and is replaced by sudden, blissful clarity, so relieving it doubles him over at first, and they stop. And every time, every single time, Emmanuel sees those green eyes, the epitome of what he has concluded must be holiness, blink back at him as he does the Lord’s work.
Emmanuel performs his first miracle halfway through October, only a few weeks after being rescued by Daphne. A month later, they get married.
The Fowler Christian Church is nothing impressive. It is in a much plainer building than the other churches that dot the blocks of Main Street, but Daphne waxes poetic about the divinity of a simple, humble wedding in a church that eschews denominational clashes and focuses solely on the word of the Lord. Emmanuel is not quite acclimated to the politics of organized Christianity, being much more focused on learning the basic routines of humanity, and of seeking out the people in need of miracles.
The marriage is not a true one, not in the legal sense. As Emmanuel woke up with no clothes and no memory, he also woke up with no identification, no documents, no proof he ever existed at all. But the marriage is the two of them acknowledging that they are all each other has. The minister presides; there is no wedding party, no congregants. As Emmanuel stands there on the altar wearing a suit Daphne bought for him from a thrift store quite literally down the street, he suddenly experiences a bizarre situation: that he would truly prefer the hem of his jacket to be much longer. That it is that type of clothing he suddenly knows he is accustomed to, and even now, not performing a miracle, but being subject to a very earthly one, a conception of human love and commitment, he feels like there is someone missing at his side, someone who should be watching this, someone with eyes that shine and a smile that curves in jagged lines like his bride’s. Emmanuel almost laughs through his vows. He should not be saying these words to Daphne, despite that she is all he has. Even as a pang of guilt tears through him, he knows that he has indeed met someone before who has lived the dedication and the commitment he speaks of now, and that this person is missing. Or maybe Emmanuel himself is the one missing, torn from his old life, his old work, whatever and wherever that may be.
The sensation fades quick. The vow is said, Emmanuel settles into the heaviness of it, and Daphne leans in to kiss him. He doesn’t know if he has ever kissed anyone before. It’s a gesture of completion, and although he doesn’t feel himself light up at it, he thinks he understands its significance. Daphne leans back and studies her husband, her eyes shining. She looks lovely, cast in the shattered light passing through the chapel’s stained glass, sharp shades of scintillating green slashing across her face like the angles of a lost smile. Emmanuel loses this comparison soon after.
Although they try to aspire to saintly behavior, they are not saints. They made love for the first time long before they were married. After Emmanuel works a miracle, they often do. Daphne is so moved by the wonders that flow from her husband and Emmanuel, knowing no other outlets for his passion, is happy to oblige. It is, Emmanuel rations, a normal, emotional reaction to the intensity of their life, an outlet of sorts. Emmanuel knows no other way, but he can’t help but feel, as his wife grips his shoulders and whispers praises into his ears, that his body was meant for something else entirely, and not for the keening embrace of his wife’s body. There must be more to his existence than the physical reaction of sex, the flush and the salivating and the animalistic twitches and noises. There must be more to love. He craves more, but what that more is, or who, he of course cannot place. Sometimes, he follows placidly what Daphne does; she calls out his name, so he calls out hers. Her name feels familiar on his tongue. Some of its sounds rattle around his mouth like a name that, while in the bleary glowy mood that follows their lovemaking, he feels certain belonged to someone he knew before. A lover or otherwise, he can’t say for sure, but he knows he said that name a lot, more than any other. It’s a name he held in high regard, and he feels without it like an empty vessel. He aches for the mysterious holder of that name, whatever it is. He just wants clarity. The lack of knowledge alone is crushing, but then Emmanuel reminds himself that his small, insular, simple life is a brand from God, and he mustn’t be jealous or spiteful. It settles him, but sometimes, in the early dawn hours after a particularly passionate night, as he watches the light from the sun cast the distant crags of the Rockies in pale pink, he can’t help but feel wretched, like his insides are crawling with pestilence. He has no way of knowing, being so utterly inexperienced in the rhythms and foibles and intricacies of society, but he feels this kind of wishful thinking while he is happily married is wrong. He knows of so little, except for Daphne, so why does he wish for something so far beyond his grasp it may as well be beyond this mortal coil?
The sun ignites the flanks of the mountains in crystalline brilliance and Emmanuel feels the now-telltale itch in his throat bubble into existence. He rises from bed, leaving his wife behind, wreathed in tousled sheets, and gets dressed. He has work to carry out.
Springtime has wound its way up the low hills and shallow channels of the high plains, ever closer to the mountains. The snowdrops poked their head through the frost in Emmanuel’s flowerbeds weeks ago, and the tulips have opened themselves to the sun today, he notices as he steps down the stoop of Daphne’s home and considers where he will be drawn today. He does not understand himself, the abilities held within his body, or the instinct that drives those abilities, but he feels he has no choice but to trust it. He wishes for a more willful existence, he thinks he maybe once fought for that, but he is so ignorant of what came before. He follows his feet. They know. Today, he walks east.
It is an unbalancing sensation, but at some point, when Emmanuel settles into the meditative rhythm of walking, the cracked, gravel streets of Fowler seem to slip away. The sun slants the wrong way and the volume of the sky seems to at once lean in upon him, heavy and cloying, and grow greatly in volume like a great cavern. A mere blink later, and Emmanuel slips out of the strange gray darkness like an urban alleyway. He shakes himself like he is throwing the slick of rain off his coat.
He is in a park, in some great city, one of the ones that lines the eastern coast of the country. As frustrating as it is, he hasn’t yet quite learned the difference between Baltimore and Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Ultimately though, the geography of where he works doesn’t concern him. Emmanuel leaves those matters to more earthy men. Again, he prays for forgiveness for his conceit.
The park is beautiful. Trees scrawl, withered and arthritic, into the sky, black against aching early spring blue. Beyond the bounds of the urban forest, steel and concrete pile into the sky. A few people are milling about, enjoying the slowly warming weather. One of these people, somewhere in this park, is in great agony. He can already feel, can feel the ticks of damage tearing through nerves, deadening sensation, pushing clouds against vision. If Emmanuel puts a hand to his belly, he can almost feel the lurid pulse of blood flooding out of the person’s body and watering the frosted ground, melting down to the soggy, browned grass beneath. His gut, or perhaps divine providence, tells him to walk into the woods, away from the main thoroughfare he has found himself on.
The trees grow denser, the shade grows deeper, twigs reach for Emmanuel’s face; he must bat them away. The pounding of despair coiled in his gut grows more blinding. He reaches for the person in need and stumbles forward and—
—there is a young man here, twisted in ruins on the ground, writhing. His breath puffs in the cold air. The blood pouring out of his gut causes even more mist. It hangs in the air, and the funk of sublimated iron is tangy and awful on Emmanuel’s tongue.
“Are you—” Emmanuel starts, descending to a knee at the individual’s backside.
“—God?” the man cries out, hysterical. Blood foams pink on his lips. He can’t be older than 20. Emmanuel swallows back bile. This is the worst damage he has been called to heal.
“No,” Emmanuel replies, forcing a soothing balm into his voice. “But I am here to help you anyways.”
“I was mugged,” the man is slurring his words. The blood is so bright against his skin. He should be several tones darker than Emmanuel but he is pale, drawn, what with his life leeched out of him like this. Emmanuel leans over, leans in, leans close, and finds the wound. There is a terrific ragged gash running down the man’s side, just below his ribcage. Blood burbles forth like a spring. The man’s eyes are half-lidded, or they would be if his lids weren’t swollen shut, huge purple bruises bloating the tissue and forcing it across the expanse of his eyes. There is something about this sight that gives Emmanuel pause, an absurd sense of deja vu, like he’s seen a wound like this before and cared for it, fixed it with a single, gentle, loving touch.
This man has only moments left to live, Emmanuel reminds himself. This is no time for memory-seeking.
He gathers that strange little spark inside of him, the one presumably placed there by God, and prays that he has the strength for this man, so close to the infinitesimal line between life and death. He prays and he coaxes the divinity out of himself, to his skin, feels a euphoric tingle, so much unlike the physical release of the love he makes with Daphne, so much more raw and tangible and practical than that, and places a hand, softly, carefully, on the incision, no longer belching blood, on the stranger’s ribs. The man stills, gasps, and goes silent.
They are always strangers, these people. Emmanuel either finds them or they find him, they dance in a most intimate affair, and then they part, still remaining strangers. Most Emmanuel will never learn their names. But, he has seen their inner light, touched, infused some of his own into theirs. It’s most personal, and despite this, it feels perfectly natural to Emmanuel, despite his lack of knowledge of humanity, despite his missing the first what must be three decades of his life.
This man requires so much effort. Emmanuel presses his hand further into the blood, feels the warmth of this person’s rapidly fading life envelop his hand, and he grits his teeth and pushes . He wills this man to health harder than anyone he has helped before. And as he does so, the impenetrable veil in the back of his mind, just for a moment, utterly crumbles.
The green-eyed man strides across the bare, deserted landscape of his hippocampus. He is clad simply, in well-picked but worn clothes, like a modern-day pilgrim. The dying man jolts under Emmanuel’s hand. His heart creaks into motion once more, and then stutters back towards oblivion.
“Cas,” the man says, shaking his head like he can’t believe himself, “I mean, I've had more fun with you in the past twenty-four hours than I've had with Sam in years.” Emmanuel feels himself smile, despite himself. “And you're not that much fun.” The man below him takes a gasping breath. The image shifts. The green-eyed man is looking in impressed surprise at Emmanuel.
“Pretty nice timing, Cas.” Who is Cas?
Emmanuel hears himself reply, in a voice that he knows is his, but feels resolutely alien. It’s solid, certain, sure. “We had an appointment.”
The man smiles in a way not unlike Daphne’s, like he’s not used to his muscles moving like that. Or maybe Daphne smiles not unlike the green-eyed man. He reaches out a hand and claps Emmanuel on the shoulder. A thrill runs through him. The man below him groans and shifts. His heartbeats become more confident. Emmanuel can feel the skin stitching itself back up, the man’s mortal wound being extirpated from his body.
“Don’t ever change,” the green-eyed man says.
Emmanuel, then and now, on either side of the countlessly long gap between this memory’s occurrence and now, promises to himself that, for this man, he will never.
Emmanuel leaves before the man he has saved can get his name. It never feels right to share more than the holy experience of a miracle with one of his patients. He doesn’t want them to hold gratitude for him. He can’t stand the thought of someone believing they owe him a debt. As he finds his way back, impossibly, through the shadows to his sleepy block in Colorado, he tries to conjure up the image of the memory that accosted him during the miracle, but finds it has already vacated his mind, leaving nothing but the faint aftertaste of euphoria and a subtle shade of green in the back corners of his thoughts. He palms the back of his neck and tries not to stumble as he approaches his front walk. He knows Daphne will want to interrogate the memory he had while saving the man; she always does. But he is tired. He doesn’t want to pick through the ashes of his ruined brain; he knows he will be left disappointed.
His neck stings, a similar instinctual situation to the one at the top of his chest that guides him to work. He stops cold. There are two strangers on his porch. They are practically stalking each other, like feral creatures ready to pounce. One man is standing square in front of the door, as if he is trying to guard the house from this other person, but their postures are all wrong. This man holds the posture of an aggressor. The other, shorter man, the one whose glance flits to the window, looks concerned, withdrawn, certainly the one on defense. It is subtle but this man holds himself like he is used to being beaten and tossed aside. His shoulders hitch high around his collar. Then he moves to the side and Emmanuel catches a glimpse of the face of the man pacing in front of the door and he nearly vomits.
This man does have a normal, perfectly human face, but it is a thin, cheap facade. His real countenance shines through brilliantly, and it is wrong in every way and twisted, with skin like deep, toxic smoke that writhes and eyes that gleam with putrid orange light. This individual, Emmanuel can tell, is evil incarnate, wrapped in a disguise of complete specious normalcy.
“—No?” The man with the false face is saying. “Whatever Emmanuel is, Crowley’s gonna want him, a lot more than he wants you these days. So…” Emmanuel can scarcely react to this augur of terror saying his name, can’t think to run or even worry for his wife’s safety before the terrible creature at the top of his steps lunges for the shorter man. He wants to shout at the man, to warn him of this monster’s hellish nature, before the man, with effortless, athletic grace, flips a knife out of the folds of his thick, rough-hewn jacket and slams it hilt-deep into the creature’s chest. It chokes in agony and then there is a sound like a match catching, and yellow light glows from within the creature. Then it slumps, lifeless, to the ground and slides halfway down his stairs. Emmanuel can feel from somewhere deep within him, from the same place that heals the hurt, that whatever awful thing was in the body of that poor man has perished.
He looks up to see the shorter man staring, nearly slackjawed at him. There is a despair spreading across his features, and Emmanuel is next to certain it is not despair at murdering the invader. The man’s green eyes blink at him with dreadful recognition, and Emmanuel has to shake away the creeping sense of familiarity that wraps itself around his shoulders.
“What was that?” he finds himself asking.
This man, whoever he is, is a friend. When Emmanuel rushes inside to ensure Daphne is safe, he lets the man follow him in, letting him ensure there are no other strange creatures inside his home.
There is a burn from rope on his wife’s wrists. He touches it with two fingers, but something stops him from healing the injuries just yet.
“That creature hurt you,” he hears himself saying. The words are hollow. He feels woefully inadequate, despite the miracle he performed just an hour earlier, because he doesn’t feel anger. There is no rage burning him up. What type of human doesn’t feel at their loved one being hurt? He must be sick. He just feels empty. He feels unbalanced. The world is widening before him, and it is terrifyingly close to the sensation he experiences when he pokes too much at his lost memories.
“I’m okay,” Daphne says as Emmanuel carefully unties the ropes. “But Emmanuel, they were looking for you.”
Emmanuel looks at his wife, studies her features, studies the woman who saved him from a wild state and brought him food, shelter, and something akin to love. He realizes with a start that the feeling coursing through him isn’t a lack of anger, it’s assuredness. Not in himself, he realizes, but in humanity. There will always be brave people, like his wife, brave enough to trust in what may come. Brave like this mysterious green-eyed stranger, who wrestled with what must have been hellfire, and with as little effort as a flick of a blade, won.
“It’s okay,” he says. He hasn’t properly greeted or thanked this stranger. He turns to him. The man is standing back, eyes stuck on Emmanuel’s hands on his wife’s wrists. They shine. “I’m Emmanuel,” he says to the man, and puts out his hand. The man takes it and shakes. The hand resting in Emmanuel's is warm, and calloused, and fits around his in a shockingly gentle way. Emmanuel can hardly believe the palm sweating against his is the one that thrust a blade deep into a monster just minutes before. It feels like the hand of a tortured soul. And when he looks into the man’s eyes, Emmanuel wonders why this stranger, despite meeting someone for the first time, looks like he has lost a first love.
The man swallows. His adam’s apple bobs raggedly. “Dean,” he says. “I’m…Dean."