No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

Twenty-One

The phone in his left pocket rang. His phone in his right pocket, of course, rang back, but it was another five minutes before he picked up this one. Inevitably, he answered, “Yeah?”

The first thing the voice in his ear said was, “It’s been twenty-one years.”

It was, in fact, twenty-one years, two months, and two days ago that he’d opened the door to the apartment and found twenty-one corpses in his hallway, with the telltale red marks on their necks.

He asked himself, as he listened, if this voice was actually speaking from the grave, and he wondered how it was that he didn’t find the idea so much more troubling than it used to be. He felt, all the same, that it wasn’t a very comforting feeling. He did, after all, remember this voice.

He remembered it, in fact, as the voice of the man who’d been talking to him earlier, the man who’d been standing just a few feet away and in earshot as he’d made a deal with the Devil for the last time. He hadn’t found it odd that the voice in his ear should have a name, but the fact that it was in his ear and had his own name was in fact more than enough to make that fact, for him, a terrible thing to think about.

He said to the voice, “You’re saying you know.”

“I’m saying,” the voice said, “that I used to know.”

The first words out of that man’s mouth, at that first meeting in the park, were, “Twenty-one years is a long time.”

He heard, in the voice’s voice, the same kind of sadness he’d heard then, and the same kind of sense of distance he’d felt.

He remembered the same sense of distance.

He’d been sitting here and listening to this man in the park talk when a plane had flown overhead, low over the trees. He’d heard it, just barely audible. He couldn’t quite hear it any more, but it had been a sound that he’d thought he’d heard for years. He’d thought that he could, at times, still hear it.

But then, just a few minutes ago, he had gotten up and walked up a hill in the park. He had walked far, in a way that seemed almost a little like a kind of pilgrimage, a way in which the park might have seemed a strange place to be walking. It was like a walk of atonement, perhaps. But he couldn’t have explained how he felt.

He could, in fact, have said why he was feeling that way. In that moment, as he was walking in the park, he had felt that, in that moment, he could have been talking to that man again, just a few minutes earlier, before this place had looked just as he remembered. It was a feeling of nostalgia, yes. But there was no nostalgia about it. Just a sense of loss.

He said to the voice, “You used to know me?”

The voice answered, “I used to.”

The same, the same thing. He was remembering.

The same thing.

There had been this man standing in a park. And this man, in that park, talking to him, telling him a story. And he was telling this story, talking to him, saying,

There had been this man. There was this man in the park.

There had been this man.

There had been this man here.

There was this man, now.

There was this man, at the park.

There was this man, sitting by the fountain.

He said, “What was your name?”

The voice in his ear said, “My name was twenty-one years old.”

“What was your name?”

There had been this man.

There had been this man who stood there in a park.

He said, “What was my name? Twenty-one years ago.”

There had been this man.

There was this man.

He said to the voice, “What was my name?”

“Twenty-one years ago,” the voice said again.

“You said my name was my name.”

“Twenty-one years ago,” the voice answered.

He said to the voice, “My name is twenty-one years.”

The voice said, “Twenty-one years ago.”

And, there.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Twenty-One