Hierarchy of Heaven

I am told that power lies beneath the surface. That the open loop of the Circle Line is a sigil charging as it waits for its circuit to be completed; that the empty node where the Downtown Line curves back over itself is the point where two ley lines cross; that the driverless Light Rail cars glow and float up like bubbles when no one is watching.

Sarah, who took a course on angelology on exchange last semester, claims that it’s all down to angel bones in the soil, long and curved and jointless and perfect. “Just think about it,” she says. “It’s a train track. That means track pins. Pins. Angels. Dancing. It all fits.”

“That doesn’t fit at all,” counters Yan. “What does an angel dancing in the MRT tunnel have to do with bones? And the pins are on the trains, not the track.”

“The bones make them holy,” Sarah insists. “The pins make them a good place to hang out. You know, the things that fasten the tracks?”

“You mean spikes?” Yan asks. “Firstly, they’re called spikes, not pins. Secondly, I don’t think we even use those in the MRT. We run live rails. What about the overground parts anyway?”

“Perfect,” Sarah replies. “According to Genesis, sunlight was the first created thing. Angels should get to enjoy it too. The ones with legs, anyway. The ones that aren’t already on fire, I’m sure they’d be tired of all that light.”

You shouldn’t expect too much in an argument with Sarah.

⁂

Yan and I take the same bus home. As the crow flies and the pavement used to run, we live about five minutes away from each other on foot. In the past year, the construction site for a new MRT station has emerged between our estates. Since then, the road has been cut and recut, with the bus stop only ever inching farther away and our commute home becoming more convoluted by the week.

Sarah doesn’t need to be here, lives in another direction entirely, but of course she’s tagged along. She takes the incline of the hill slower, walking a few metres behind us. She’s swinging a loosely knotted bag of yellow apples for Yan’s mother, the best Sheng Siong’s produce section has to offer. She’s every parent’s favourite.

“Did you hear?” Yan says as we walk past the hoarding. “They’re going to tunnel directly under my building. My father is furious.”

“Wow, really?” I ask, pausing to peer through a metal grille. Not much seems to be happening: they’ve broken ground, of course, but broken ground isn’t much to see, just clay and its absence. “Sarah’s going to be over the moon.” I glance back to see if Sarah heard; her responding grin sheds no light on the situation at all.

“We got the letter from the LTA yesterday. They claim it shouldn’t affect us at all, but you know how that goes.” Yan grins, then stops, tiptoes to look over my shoulder. “They’ve clearly got a long way to go.”

“They have four whole years to do it,” I say. “We’ll have graduated. Goodness knows where we’ll be or what trains we’ll need then. By the time the station actually opens, you’ll be off doing your PhD in some fancy city with an actually rational public transport network.”

“A better-preserved angel!” Sarah chimes in; she’s caught up. “None of those silly gaps. Or somewhere with some history to it. London or Berlin or something. You’ll let us visit all the time, won’t you?”

Yan shakes their head fondly. “I couldn’t possibly keep you away,” they say as we resume walking. “But I doubt this station will be open when they say it will. At this rate, I’ll be back with my doctorate long before the first train runs from this stop.”

“There’s no harm in having a little faith,” I say. Yan laughs, quiet and slow.

⁂

Sunday afternoon, and Sarah’s in her concert blacks. Yan and I meet her at the stage door, each holding a single cut gerbera, their heavy heads already drooping. When she sees us, Sarah makes a gleeful noise, links arms with us both and calls for one of her section mates to help take a picture of the three of us thus chained together.

Before we can ask Sarah if she’s got plans for the evening with her band friends, she’s thrusting her trumpet case into my arms and a canvas bag into Yan’s, and telling us to wait a minute while I just get changed, we can all hang out now that the concert’s over, maybe get dinner later, can’t we? Yan nods as I swing the trumpet case onto my shoulder, and so Sarah sweeps away, our flowers in her hands.

“Don’t they have dressing rooms back there?” Yan asks me as we watch Sarah go.

“Maybe she wanted to get pictures with the outfit,” I guess. “Or it’s some weird musician superstition.”

When Sarah reemerges, she’s tucked the flowers into her hair; one behind each ear, vibrantly red and orange. The thick stems poke awkwardly through her ponytail. We’d been hoping for yellow, Sarah’s favourite colour, but the small florist’s stand at the train station was all out.

“Come on,” Sarah says. Yan and I follow her through the milling group of musicians still dressed in black, her possessions in tow.

“We passed by a bunch of interesting statues on the way here,” I say casually, “Angels and things. Want to have a look?”

“They better not be the ones at the Catholic cathedral,” Sarah says darkly, “I pass those on the bus every time I come here and they’re hideous. All that fluorescent light.”

“Certainly not,” Yan says. “No cathedrals on a Sunday.”

“I suppose that rules out St Andrew’s too,” Sarah says brightly.

“Wait, but aren’t the ones at the Catholic cathedral playing trumpets?” I ask. “I thought you’d like that. They’re like you.”

Sarah rolls her eyes. “They’re not even trumpets, they’re cornets,” she says, “and they’ve got the fingering all wrong.”

The church on Hill Street has its gate open. Unlike the sundry other places of worship in the City Hall area, there are no congregants to be seen in this grassy garden. Sarah walks straight in, stepping unhesitatingly onto consecrated ground in her flip-flops and torn denim shorts.

“So what kind of angels are these?” I ask. Yan is rolling up the sleeves of their button down, wiping sweat away from their forehead with the back of their hand.

“Just plain angels,” Sarah says dismissively. The bronze figures are about waist height, with what looks to be the usual number of limbs. They’re playing instruments too; a band of children with no conductor in sight.

“Is this one actually playing the trumpet?” Yan asks, pointing at one, and Sarah nods.

“And that one’s a harp,” she says. “Did you know that an angel is the worst kind of angel you can be?”

“Why’s that?” I ask, squatting to look at the trumpeter’s puffed cheeks and defined elbows. The fingers are somewhat less than clear, though Sarah hasn’t brought it up. Yan is leaning over to inspect the angel with the harp.

“They’re just at the bottom of the rankings,” Sarah says, shrugging. “They’re not very exciting. Give me a cherub anytime.”

“You mean the naked ones?” I ask.

“No,” Sarah says, exaggeratedly patient, “The ones with the extra heads. Lion and ox and I think eagle. Or maybe hawk. Who knows when you can’t see the wings.”

“Is that why these ones aren’t very important?” I ask. “Because they look too much like people with all those joints and the not being on fire and everything?”

“Well, yes,” Sarah says. “We never even made it on the charts.”

⁂

I dream I’m Sisyphus pushing a boulder up Bukit Timah Hill, except it’s a light rail car instead of a boulder and the rubber wheels keep getting stuck in the vegetation. There’s an angel dancing beside me, on a rusted spike that must have come loose from the tracks in order to hover in mid-air.

She has wings on fire, which makes me think seraph at first, but she also has six faces: a black dog with round orange patches where its eyebrows could have been, a wild pig with pointed teeth, a snail with gently bobbing tentacles, a grey pigeon and a brown one, and most terrifyingly, Sarah. I have no idea where to even start with that, so I focus on the incline.

“You know, that would just carry itself right up if you stopped trying to push it like that,” the pig face tells me. Her voice is still Sarah’s, with a little extra nose to it. “It would be a smoother ride for them too.”

From inside the car, Yan turns to wave at me and smile. Their parents are in there as well, pointing at the floor and shaking their heads. My hands are unsteady, and the car trembles. Yan’s parents frown.

“You should just let it happen,” the snail head tells me. “You should just let go,” says the dog.

“You’re trying to get us all killed,” I say. My bare foot snags on a rock, begins to bleed sluggishly.

“Angels don’t die,” says Sarah’s human face. I keep walking up the hill.

⁂

A few months later, the construction site hoarding is mounted with leafy plants. The pavement turns a darker grey when the workers water the wall of shallow troughs every morning and evening. Yan calls it greenwashing.

My parents aren’t home, so we’re in my living room. Yan has sprawled over the length of the sofa while I sit cross-legged on the piano bench. Sarah leans over the balcony rail, trying to see into the worksite for the new train station. “It’s just broken ground again,” she says after a while.

“It’s like all they do is break the ground, fill it in, and then break it again,” I say. Yan groans inarticulately. “I mean, hopefully they’ll just do it once when they get to your building,” I say to Yan as they roll themself over on the sofa so they’re facing the ceiling fan.

“I had a dream, you know,” they say as Sarah returns and perches on the sofa arm by their head. “I was on my way home, and I saw them all there, with their jackhammers and their hardhats, every colour of the rainbow. They drilled into the earth, one by one, and the road split away. They stood at the edge and watched. It was all flesh underneath, red as dark as tuna or whale or horse. It was twitching.”

“Yum,” Sarah says. “Sounds like the expensive kind of tuna.”

“I got blood on my feet,” Yan tells us. “I wasn’t wearing shoes.”

“What happened next?” Sarah asks. Looking out the balcony, I watch a squirrel scraping at a turmeric pod with its teeth. “Was it an angel?”

“How would I know what an angel’s meat looks like?” Yan asks. “I went home. I fell asleep. When I woke up, my feet were clean.”

⁂

Yan gets into grad school in London. Sarah decides to delay her entry to the workforce, and follow them for a few months. She wants to ride the Underground to Angel, and a few other places while she’s at it. Yan’s parents don’t have space in their car for all of us, so I help Sarah with her luggage in the train.

“You’re both going to miss the opening of the new train line,” I say lightly as Sarah sways, clinging on to a hanging strap. She looks me in the eye and laughs.

“You’re going to miss us!” she says. “A train line will keep.”

“Angels are patient, are they?” I ask, and she agrees.

At the entry to the transit area, Yan puts down their bags and Sarah’s to hug me and promise they’ll be back, a statement I have no reason to doubt. Sarah, arms occupied by yet more bags, presses her cheek to mine and makes no such promise, instead telling me she’ll send pictures from every station she visits. This, too, is believable.

After Yan and Sarah are past security and out of waving distance, Yan’s parents drive me home. For a while, I watch the streetlights winking past, bright against the freshly dark sky, but I soon fall asleep. In a distant, feverish dream, I see myself in an airport Skytrain with Yan’s parents. The track is shaky, and I’m looking through the windows in an attempt to find the angel responsible, when another train passes us in the opposite direction. Yan and Sarah are in there, holding hands.

The classification is easy. They look like humans, for the most part, with the usual number of joints and feet and teeth. There’s the matter of the wings, but that’s practically a given as far as these things are concerned. What stops them from being mere angels, the lowest in a hierarchy that leaves no room for me, is that they are both stunningly beautiful. Neither of these Dominions (heavenly bureaucrats, as Sarah would put it, the ultimate in may I speak to your manager) is on fire, but they are radiant all the same.

⁂

Another dream, some months later:

It is the night after the new station opens. I am lying in Yan’s bed, the side where Sarah usually flops herself when we visit. I am alone here, but I feel another heartbeat rumbling in the echoes of my own, something lower and larger and more patient than I know how to be. The vibrations make my bones itch, and I shift and stretch to try and make the discomfort fade. When that fails, I get up and go to the window, shoulder blades aching. I expect to see the road split open, its living flesh exposed.

Instead, I see a railroad track. Old fashioned, with the kind of spikes Sarah would call a pin. I turn back, to count the number of wings I have, and find it to be zero.

Little matter. I brace my hands on the sill and clamber out, wondering absently where the grille went. My feet touch old metal, and my blood begins to sing.

On the heads of those spikes, I begin to dance – a slow, stumbling waltz, the only steps I can remember and those clumsy, unpartnered. I hum an aimless tune. Every now and then, I try to calculate the ratio of angel to pin, but my shoulder blades remain shoulder blades and the fraction still totals zero.

I know there is a train coming. I do not change my course.

⁂

I’m taking the new train line home from work, watching creation’s first spectacle: a sky turning all the vibrant shades of pollution. At the aboveground station, there are glass barriers lining the platform, and metal plaques behind them that read Do not go down to the tracks. There’s a kind of poetry to that I can’t quite put my finger on, so I watch the sky instead.

My phone buzzes with an alert as my train begins to pull in with its gently slowing roar. I open my messages to find a photo from Sarah, with her arm around Yan. They’re both smiling, and Yan has lipstick smeared on their cheek.

The caption? train delay!!! 😀 (but like 2 hours ago bc the tube has no signal)

I shake my head and put my phone away. It buzzes again as I board the train, and once I’ve settled myself against a rail, I open my messages again.

Still Sarah. yan and I are coming home for the summer!! Expect Us. we miss you lots and also want to meet the angel living under the new train station.

I send back a smiling emoji with a halo and a single pair of wings: nothing more than a plain old angel at the bottom of the ranks, but perhaps still good enough for them.

Andrew Kirkrose Devadason (he/him; b. 1997) is a queer nonbinary Singaporean poet writer. Under his birth name, Devadason contributed the winning poem of the 2019 Hawker Prize to the journal OF ZOOS. His work has appeared in journals including Cordite Poetry Review and PERVERSE, and anthologies including New Singapore Poetries and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.