by Tad Williams
“Down, Fido,” I told him quietly, crimping his neck until he stopped struggling so hard. “Let the big boys settle this.”
“Here!” Suddenly rough, clawed hands were pulling at me. I wasn’t going to start a brawl in front of a heavenly judge so I let myself be tugged back onto my feet, although by the time I had my balance Grasswax had pulled my jacket most of the way off. “How dare you!” he snarled, but he didn’t sound entirely convincing-I think he was playing it up for the judge.
“Easy, everybody,” said Sam, getting into the middle. He helped me get my jacket back over my shoulders, then patted me back into shape with a care that was almost fatherly. We’ve been through a lot, Sam and me. “Just a misunderstanding,” he said, glaring at the kid.
Howlingfell was getting up now, too. He looked like he thought he understood everything just fine: his murderous scowl could have bubbled paint.
“Misunderstanding?” Grasswax surveyed us all, a look of calculated outrage twisting his unpleasant features into something even less charming. “Did I misunderstand when I thought I heard an apprentice, unsworn and unnamed before this judge, interrupting an officer of prosecution? Or did it really happen…?”
What Did He Mean? This from the judge, each word like a silver bell in a church tower, loud and vibrant, silencing Grasswax just as he was getting worked up to a grand, oratorical flourish. Xathanatron turned his faceless gaze toward Clarence. Speak, Child. I Give You Leave.
“Her husband-he…he s-stole from her!” To his credit, the kid at least looked properly terrified at what he’d got himself into. “He stole her youth.”
“What rubbish.” Grasswax wore the expression of a man forced to watch a long elementary school performance while standing outside in foul weather.
Clarence turned to face the judge. “From the day they were married, her husband only made love to her one night a month, like…like it was a job. Without…foreplay, without kissing. Rolled off and went to watch television.” The youngster was scarlet, embarrassed. “Then, after their fourth child, he just stopped. Told her she’d let herself go. That she sickened him.” He looked over to the deceased, but Silvia Martino seemed lost in a memory or even a dream, her eyes unfocused. “That’s stealing, right?” he said at last.
I knew I shouldn’t have let the kid talk to her. I felt like punching myself in the nuts for letting it happen. When did he get all that out of her? Even Sam looked as if it had caught him by surprise, and he’d talked to the guardian angel.
When Clarence was not immediately changed into hot steam it seemed pretty clear the judge was going to allow his evidence. Sam knew better than to look this gift horse in the mouth any longer than he needed to. He quickly added a strong theme of tragic suffering to his summation and rode that nag all the way home.
I still wouldn’t have wanted to put money on which way Xathanatron was going to go, but when a column of lavender light surrounded the late Mrs. Silvia Martino, and a look crept over Grasswax’s face that suggested some paralegal in Hell was going to get a horrible bollocking, I knew it was over and Sam had won.
Suddenly the deceased was gone. Grasswax took off a moment later, silent and very unpleasantly angry. Howlingfell pointed a shaking, clawed finger at me. “You’re dead, Dollar!” he growled, but his voice was still a bit weak from my knee crushing his trachea. A moment later he followed Grasswax through the shimmering wound and then, except for the judge, it was just angels standing around in the frozen moment.
“Congrats,” I told Clarence. “You’ve made your first batch of enemies today.”
“What?”
“And not just on the other team,” Sam said. “If you ever do that to me again, kid, they’ll never find all the different pieces.”
“Pieces…?”
“Of you.” He shook his head in disgust. “You get any more bright ideas, try ’em out on me or Bobby first.”
I was watching Xathanatron, who to my discomfort seemed to be staring in my direction. I’d kind of hoped that scuffle with Howlingfell would have been beneath the high angel’s notice.
You Are Wanted In The Celestial City, Angel Doloriel, the pillar of light told me. Sam and the kid didn’t hear it, but for me it came loud enough to make my cheekbones ache. Your Archangel Wishes To Speak With You. Then the big glow was gone.
“C’mon,” Sam said to me. “Time to go back. I’m going to buy Clarence an ice cream. I mean, we did win the case.”
Me, I was feeling thirsty-that’s just how I react to happy endings. But then I react to unhappy ones pretty much the same way.
two
my lucky week
I already know some of the questions you want to ask. The answers are:
1) Yes, it’s pretty darn interesting being an angel.
2) No, I haven’t met God. Yet.
3) I can’t tell you which religion was right after all, because it’s not exactly clear.
4) As to what Heaven’s like…well, bear with me and I’ll try to explain.
First off, Heaven is…complicated. It’s not just a castle on a cloud or some paradise garden. It’s big, even though there’s only one city-the Celestial City itself. But that city is surrounded by what they call the Fields, which are lands that stretch on and on in all directions, seemingly forever, rolling hills and meadows and even forests full of souls that I’ve always assumed are the departed of Earth living the good life of Eternity. If you ask them, though, they don’t know any more about it than I do about my own pre-angelic life-they’re just happy.
Usually when you’re summoned you go straight to the Celestial City. You don’t walk when you’re there, or even fly. Nothing that simple. Even calling it a city is a bit misleading, although there are times when it seems to be exactly that, when you catch glimpses of the enormity that is around you, towers and heights and shining walkways impossibly far above your head. Wherever you go shining presences surround you like the lights of a million happy cars on a busy but absolutely safe freeway, and each of those presences is an angel. And somewhere at the heart of it, a place you can never quite see but that you always know is there, a constant glow in the edge of your sight and sense and imagination, is the Empyrean, the innermost district of Heaven where they say the Highest dwells.
Invitation only, needless to say.
But all that doesn’t begin to describe Heaven, how it looks, feels, tastes. Do you remember the Electrical Parade they used to do at the Disney parks in the evenings, with all the gleaming lights and dancing characters? Well, it’s a bit like that, but only if you had a strong fever that also somehow made you feel secure and comfortable and like you never wanted to ask another question because it was just too much trouble.
I got over the last part-a few of us do. Now I ask lots of questions, but mostly to myself.
Another problem: the sights you see in Heaven, the look of the citizens, even the conversations you have there tend to be slippery in the mind afterward. I’m sure I’m frustrating you, but there really is no good way to explain quite what it’s like, because by the time you get back it doesn’t even feel the same to you, even though you’re the one it happened to. Like trying to remember exactly how everything worked in a dream. When you’re up at the House, as Sam calls it, you know how to get where you need to go, you know where you are, you see things and they make sense. But just try to draw a map afterward. Doesn’t work.
I don’t think most of the angels in Heaven worry about things like this-certainly not the way I do. In fact, other than a few of my earthbound friends, everybody else in the angelic throng seems to believe that even wondering about how things work is a form of ingratitude. But I can’t help being this way. It’s just the way the Highest made me.
Don’t get me wrong, though-I like Heaven okay, and I like being an angel. Beats the crap out of the alternative. Especially when you consider that the time-frame in question is eternity.
You can think of the next part as taking place in Temuel’s office in the Californi
a building of the North American Continent Complex, although calling any structure in Heaven a “building” and any place in that structure an “office” is a gross oversimplification of a very strange, very shiny and floaty reality. Temuel was my special archangel-my supervisor, I guess you’d call him. Not my mentor, though, because I’d been in the department longer than he had. He was aware of that, so he shied away from the whole “boss” thing and tried to work the “older friend” angle instead, especially with me and Sam and the other veterans. We let him. It’s better when everyone knows, or at least thinks they know, where they stand.
We didn’t tell him his nickname, of course. There aren’t too many good ways to spin “The Mule.” But nobody really disliked him. He was just the boss, and an archangel to boot, and that made real affection difficult. The higher angels are just too…distant to get chummy with, even the more approachable ones like Temuel.
“Ah, Angel Doloriel!” he said with deliberate good cheer when I showed up. (You can’t always tell by looking at them, but some angels in Heaven are “he” and some are “she,” some are kind of both, and others are just “it.” Nothing personal on my end.) “God loves you. How are things in Jude?”
If there’s anything that makes people from San Judas wince, it’s hearing people who’ve never been there call it “Jude,” but I was already feeling the mandatory cheerfulness of Heaven bubbling through me and doing my best to go with it. “Hello, chief. Things are fine, I guess. Of course the Giants spent all last year playing like they never heard of runners in scoring position, and they could use a lefty reliever something fierce, but hey, spring training’s just starting so there’s always hope.” Sometimes I talk about baseball just to annoy people who don’t understand it. It’s one of the many wonderful things about that game. “Oh, and speaking of training, Sammariel’s working with this new kid.”
“Ah, yes, young Haraheliel.” He nodded. “How does he look so far?”
“Like a pig in a bikini. But I’m sure he’ll improve.” Or he’d run his mouth again at a bad time and get us all yanked out of Jude and demoted to an eternity of making pointed suggestions to minor sinners in Purgatory. “Where’d he come from, if you don’t mind me asking?”
The bright visage of Temuel clouded the tiniest bit. He lifted his shining hand in a gesture of calculated vagueness. “Oh, Records, I think. He was transferred to us as a favor to one of the higher-ups.”
There were so many things about that sentence that scared me that I didn’t dare say a word.
“Anyway, that was really what I wanted to talk to you about,” the Mule went on.
“What? You lost me.”
“The new one. Sammariel’s trainee. I want you to keep an eye on him.”
That was even weirder. Why would anybody, let alone an archangel, be interested in a Junior Woodchuck like Clarence? “Isn’t that supposed to be Sam’s job, boss? Since he’s training him?”
The vague, gleaming gesture again. “Yes, certainly. But Sammariel doesn’t notice things the way you do, Doloriel. That’s why I’m asking you. You’ve got the eye.”
Ordinarily having a supervisor say something like that would make a guy feel good, and you’d think in Heaven it would make you feel even better, but even buoyed by pumped-in happy I was less than thrilled.
“Of course,” was what I said, having not been stupid either before or after my lamented passing. I’m hoping it was lamented, anyway, although personally I can’t remember it.
That really did seem to be all that the Mule had wanted, which made the whole thing even stranger-he had never been one for small talk, and even when he made some it was in an awkward sort of way, so you felt like you were keeping him from something more important. The truth is, I kind of liked the guy, or as much as you can like someone you don’t understand. He’d always seemed to like me too, or at least tolerate me, and that was a difference from most of the other archangels I’d met. But a boss is a boss, and since I was up at the House anyway, he made me file a bunch of reports I’d been avoiding, stuff I should have turned over days ago to Alice, our office assistant back on Earth (another angel, as far as I know, but just based on attitude, she might be a rehabbed demon.) If the road to Hell is paved in good intentions, a friend of mine used to say, the road to Heaven is paved with bullshit and busy work.
Who was this Haraheliel kid, anyway? Who had pushed buttons to get our young Clarence out of Filing and into Operations-and why? Did he know too much about something there? Or was he supposed to be someone’s spy in the Advocacy Division? Whose attention had we attracted? And why had they selected such an obvious outsider?
Wow, I can hear you saying, spies in Heaven? Suspecting your literally angelic bosses of trying to shaft you? You sure have a bad attitude, Bobby Dollar. Well, just stick with me a while before you make up your mind. That’s all I’m asking. I’ve been right more often than the haters like to admit.
I had a little time to kill before going back-my earthbound body was still in my apartment in Jude getting its seven hours of sleep-so I wandered away from the North America Building, following the climbing Avenue of Contemplation past the mansions of the blessed. As I said, one of the strangest things about Heaven is that there are no maps. If you haven’t been invited to where you’re going or don’t already have access to that particular spot, you probably won’t find it, although you’ll find a thousand other beautiful sights. You could stroll, or float, or whatever it is we do there (I’m still not sure after all these years-it just doesn’t stick in my head when I leave) for a decade and never reach the specific place you were looking for-but as I said, I wasn’t looking for anything, just wandering. I spent some time watching the Fountain of Stars and thinking big but formless thoughts. I even walked out onto Pilgrim’s Bridge, although I hadn’t meant to, and stopped in the middle of the span to look down on the great city and its sparkling, jostling crowds of inhabitants, thousands and thousands of souls, millions even, each one dedicated to order and love, each one happy with his or her place in the big plan. Beyond them all, at the top of the highest of Heaven’s hills, lay a glow like the most gorgeous sunrise-the Empyrean, the seat of the Highest. Still, being me, I couldn’t even look at that wonderful spot, the center of the Cosmos, without wondering why it was hidden away from the rest us.
Why did God make me so restless, so difficult? I’ve never understood it, but He must have wanted me to be that way, because He gave me enough for two.
As usual, when I woke up in my physical body once more it felt a little strange to me, as if someone had washed and ironed a favorite old pair of jeans. I put some coffee in the microwave-it’s strange how much like a real body mine is in terms of its needs and crotchets-and went to the mirror while waiting for the ping.
Same face. Had it for about five or six years now. Not much different from the two or three faces before it, either. It would take an expert to know I’d changed. Same body, too-average height, average weight, maybe a little wirier and more athletic than your average guy. The man in the mirror had dark hair that needed cutting, a face (ever so slightly Mediterranean or dark European) that needed shaving, and a mouth that would have been sad and artistic if it weren’t for the smile, which, although it doesn’t show up often, I’ve been told can be slightly alarming. I wondered, as I often do, if this is how I looked in life. If so, nobody’s ever mistaken me for me, if you know what I mean, but that would be quite a coincidence, I guess, to assume I’d run into anyone on Earth who might have known the old me. I might have lived in the seventeenth century for all I can guess, or wore a powdered wig and took snuff. Or I could have been a Chinese peasant. I might have been a woman, too. Could have been anybody. So why did they take that away? Why does Heaven treat souls as if they were old videotapes, erasing the priceless memories of a graduation or wedding just to record an episode of some sitcom over it? Not that I’ve got anything against situation comedy, but if we don’t get to remember what we did with our lives-even if for most of us
those lives probably sucked-why did we have to go through it in the first place?
These were my mirror thoughts. Pretty ordinary for me.
Cynical, they say. Not trusting. Bad angel!
But like I said, God must want me to be this way. Either that or He just doesn’t give a shit. To this point, I’m staying hopeful.
They were decorating Beeger Square that afternoon for the last thrash of Carnival season, which would kick off this weekend. San Judas does love its Carnival. The light poles were strung with tinsel and hung with big, scary-looking masks, and the city workers had built a temporary stage in one corner of the square-fortunately the farthest one from the Alhambra Building, where we all hang out. The folks at The Compasses hated to be distracted by amateurs.
The bar is called The Compasses because about a hundred years ago, before they turned the Alhambra into the first skyscraper in San Judas, the site of our contemporary oasis had been a fourth-floor room in the old Alhambra Theatre that the Masons had used as a meeting lodge. A stone plaque with the Square and Compasses, the symbol of their order, still hung over the front door of the building.
“But all the squares are outside,” as Sam liked to say. “So we only need the compasses.” And that’s how it got its name.
It was a slow day inside. The only regulars I saw were Sweetheart and Monica Naber at the bar watching CNN on the wallscreen and Chico the bartender polishing glasses, as usual looking about as warmly human as a statue of Lenin.
“Ooh,” Sweetheart said when he saw me come in, “I can smell the grumpiness from here, honey.” Sweetheart is built like an NFL defensive tackle but he’s as camp as a Brazilian soap opera, one of the few of us earthbound who really seems to enjoy life. “Bad time at headquarters?”
News travels fast at The Compasses. “Not really. Just the usual supervisorial jerking-around.” In fact, the whole Clarence thing worried me enough that I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone except Sam.
