by Tad Williams
“Thanks, Sheila,” said Clarence, looking as though he wanted to slide through the floor and disappear.
“Well, I remember you liked it,” she said brightly. “Help yourself to anything, boys. Goodnight!”
He was still watching the door long after she’d disappeared, probably because he didn’t want to see the expression of incredulity on my face. “You’re kidding me,” I said. “Those are your roommates?”
“What? They’re nice people.”
“Did you go out shopping for a mom and dad? Or did you answer an advertisement? ‘Wanted, surrogate child for older couple’?”
He colored very impressively. “Lay off, Dollar. You’re not funny.”
I started laughing. It took me a while to stop. “Okay, sorry. Nevermind. I’ve got more important things to do with you than argue about your weird domestic arrangements.” I leaned over and slapped him on the shoulder in my chummiest manner. “After all, we’re going to have a slumber party tonight.”
“Slumber…”
“In other words, I’m sleeping over and we’re going to Heaven together.”
“Ssshhhh!” He looked absolutely panicked. “Jeez, what if they hear you? Can you imagine how that would sound?”
I chortled again. “Pretty funny, now that you mention it. And it’s going to get worse, too, because I’m going to bunk down in your room. Just find me a spare blanket and a pillow. Maybe we’ll even tell ghost stories.”
“You’re going to sleep in my room? Isn’t that…kind of gay?”
“No. If I suggested we play Twister in our underpants, that would be kind of gay. Now shut up and find me a blanket and lead me to your room. You do have your own room, don’t you? You don’t sleep in a crib at the foot of Sheila and Burt’s bed or anything?” I know I was being a bit nasty to the kid, but I still didn’t trust him and I was interested see if I could get him riled up past his haplessness act.
He only stared morosely. “You think you’re funny, Bobby, but you’re not.”
“I do like to see a junior angel sulk,” I told him. “It smells like victory. Now drink up all your milk and then let’s get to bed. Little Clarence has a busy night ahead of him.”
twenty-five
misremembered
The kid and I met up in the Fields of Glory. Clarence was late and appeared over the brow of a green Elysian hill, waving his hands like a semaphore nostalgist. I wasn’t happy about the delay. It wasn’t so much the waiting, it was just that it left me thinking time, and thinking time meant thinking about Caz. I didn’t want to do that just at the moment, not least because I already missed her fiercely. The subject was simply too confusing, and it also made the miserable handful of options I had suddenly seem ten times worse. Either I had betrayed Heaven or I had fallen in love with someone so impossible for me that she made Dante’s untouchable Beatrice look like a Vegas street hooker.
“Sorry!” the kid said. “I had trouble falling asleep!”
“We’ve got a long walk. You’ve been here before?”
He straightened in indignation. “Of course! More than once!”
I was amused in spite of myself. It really was like dealing with a kid. He might be a complete and total traitor for all I knew, dropped into the Whole Sick Choir by my superiors to report back my every anti-Heaven grumble, but if his earnest goofiness was a complete front it was a very good one. I kept wanting to like him, and I couldn’t help wondering what kind of trouble that was going to get me into. Had Caesar enjoyed teasing Brutus right up until his best pal stabbed him?
We set out together through the brilliant green fields beneath the invisible sun that warmed everything in Heaven. One thing I did like about Clarence was that he asked as many questions as I did. The thing I didn’t like is that he asked them all out loud. He was curious, as always, about how things operated behind the scenes for our angelic business on Earth. He even asked me how the Zippers and Outside work, which is kind of like asking a Juggalo to explain magnetism.
“Okay, you don’t know how they work,” he persisted, “but can anyone do it besides an advocate? And what if someone closed it behind you? Would you be stuck there?”
“Any angel can do it-even you. Hasn’t Sam showed you how yet?”
“He said he would, but he hasn’t got around to it.”
Probably trying to minimize the trouble you can cause, I thought but didn’t say. “I’m sure he will.”
“I hope he’s okay. He looked terrible! Tubes up his nose and down his throat…”
I felt more than a bit guilty that I hadn’t visited Sam in the hospital, even though I’d been told not to show up. “As far as getting trapped Outside-no, it can’t happen, not without causing an interafter incident. The rules are very strict. They must have spent a huge part of the Convention just arguing about how all that had to be regulated.”
“Inter…after?”
I smiled. The phrase had been one of Leo’s. “Friend of mine made that up-he was a friend of Sam’s, too. Inter-afterlife. Between them and us.”
“And when you say ‘Convention,’ you mean the Tartarean Convention, right? Where we got together with the Opposition back in the beginning and made up the rules?”
“Yeah. Once it was clear that the Highest was banishing Satan’s crew but not destroying them, then everybody had to agree how the game was going to play out.” I remembered something. “You can’t force anybody to go Outside, either, or take them there against their will. That actually saved my life recently.”
“I know. With Eligor, in his office.”
I squinted at him. “How did you know that?”
“Because you told me, remember? Come on, Bobby, you’re getting paranoid. When we were getting coffee that time with Sam?”
“Oh. Yeah.” But it knocked me back a little, and so we continued for a while in silence.
I’ve been glossing over the journey through the Fields, but I really shouldn’t because it’s quite an experience. I mean, believe me, mortals would line up for miles and pay Disneyland prices just to stroll for a few hundred yards. The most amazing thing is the colors, the way they glow and snap and sparkle. People who have experienced peyote or magic mushrooms or LSD might have some inkling of how, when you’re tripping, the colors of everything seem to intensify, almost to throb with inner light. The difference with Heaven is that there’s never the harshness that happens with psychedelic drugs, let alone the potential for a bad trip. In fact, a hike through the hills and meadows that surround the Celestial City is pretty much by definition the opposite of a bad trip.
Now, of course I don’t know anything about peyote or any of those others myself. After all, I’m an angel, and even an angel who was stuck in a desert training camp with a bunch of other bored angels wearing human bodies for the first time would never experiment with drinking and illegal drugs and other such bad human habits. It just wouldn’t happen. You see that, don’t you?
Anyway, since I had decided to be a little more reticent with Clarence, I had time to appreciate again the peculiar beauty of the Fields, as well as the parts that were just plain peculiar. For one thing, although there were people all around-the Blessed, perhaps, certainly the souls of the happy departed-it was very hard to reach any of them. The Fields were dreamlike, as was the Celestial City itself, but the nature of this particular dream was that it was easy to reach things, like a shady grove or invitingly grassy hillock, but people were always farther away than they seemed: You could get to them, but if they appeared to be a few hundred feet away to begin with it might take what felt in Earthly terms like a quarter of an hour to do it. I don’t know whether that was just the unique physics of Heaven or because the Highest didn’t want people’s afterlives interrupted too easily. Not that you ever got much out of people when you talked to them in the Fields, anyway. They often seemed half-asleep, cheerful and willing to answer you, but lost in memories of the lives they had lived or the afterlife they were currently living, and only capable of paying pa
rtial attention. Sometimes, in the early days, when I was still asking my questions out loud, I would leave the Fields of Heaven feeling like a creepy grownup who’d been hanging around a children’s playground.
But the rest of the Fields offer themselves up much more easily than the inhabitants do. The sun shines all the time, but-again, like a dream-if you walk into the darker places, the shadowed corners and forested glens, you quickly find that it’s much like night in some trustworthy, beautiful, and benign nature spot. You discover places that seem to be right out of your own fondest memories, although of course, if you’re someone like me or Clarence, you have no memories to match them with, just that feeling. Everywhere you go it’s like that: unfamiliar but unthreatening, or familiar but still mysterious, as if deja vu was in the very air you breathed. And like the City, being in the Fields of Heaven feels right. It feels good. Every time I pass through I tell myself, I need to see more of this. I need to learn more. Maybe I could be happy here. Maybe.
But all things come to an end, even the endless Fields. Eventually you reach a high place where you can discern the shimmering walls of the City in the distance. For most people this would be the highlight of any trip, but for me it always comes with the smallest internal shiver of disquiet. I’ve never really felt like I belonged in Heaven. Every time I come here, even when summoned by high authorities, even on those rare occasions when I’ve been praised, I still feel as though I’m in danger of being found out.
Found out about what? I don’t know. I wish I did.
“So why did you want me to come with you?” Clarence asked as we made our way through the great gate and into the murmuring flow of angelic inhabitants that always crowd the streets. (By the way, although the streets are not really all paved in gold, there are certainly parts that seem to be, but it’s a gold that’s pleasant to the touch, yielding as firm earth, with few of the real qualities of gold except beauty.) “Is it something about Sam?”
“Why would you think that?”
He shrugged. He was already acting a little distracted, caught up in the infectious good cheer of Heaven. I could feel it myself but I was struggling hard to hold onto my sense of purpose, as I always did when I went back. I’ve found that if I go about it in the same way that a drunk undertakes a complicated task-concentrate, concentrate, concentrate-I can just about manage. Then I pass under a tree full of blossoms, each one shining from within like a fairy subdivision, and I have to start over.
“Why? I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because Sam’s in the hospital ‘cause he got hurt helping you against that ghallu thing. And because Sam’s kind of my boss.”
“Not a bad guess. But no, not really. I wanted you because you used to work in the Records Hall, right?”
For the first time since we entered the City his cheerful calm retreated a bit. He wrinkled his forehead as though I had just spoken the name of a particularly unpleasant ex-girlfriend of his-not that I believed he’d had many of those, unpleasant or otherwise. “Really?” he said. “But, I haven’t worked there for a while….”
“Not too far back, really. A few weeks, Earth time, plus your stretch in training before they sent you down-which obviously wasn’t long, at least, based on how little you know.”
He blushed. I’d never seen anyone blush in Heaven. It was charming in a pathetic sort of way. “Am I really that bad?”
“You know how nature makes babies helpless so we don’t want to eat them? Well, even Eligor’s horned monster would probably just pick you up and ruffle your hair and play a game of got-your-nose.” He looked so shamefaced I almost felt bad, but I was determined to test him. “But there’s plenty you can do to help out, and this is one of them. Let’s head over to Records and I’ll tell you.”
We drifted across Merciful Square and down the Eternal Way with its endless white columns. Angels passed us constantly, but some of the highest simply appeared and disappeared, not bothering with approximations of Earthly life. I suspected these might be the ones who had never been mortals. Every now and then I could make out the shape of golden wings inside a high angel’s glow, and it reminded me that one of the Celestial City’s very important citizens might well be a traitor. I distracted myself by pointing out some of the more esoteric sites to Clarence.
“And that’s the Panepistimion,” I said. “It’s where they learn to work with the Dominions of the Second Sphere. I don’t really understand what that means, but it has something to do with the machinery of the universe.”
“See, that’s the problem with Sam,” Junior said abruptly. “He never tells me anything. Not like you do.”
I bristled a little. “Sam’s got his own way of doing things. Don’t underestimate him.”
“I don’t, but sometimes I wish he wouldn’t…I don’t know, hold me at arm’s length so much. Half the questions I ask I don’t even get answers. Not even, ‘Shut up, I’m not going to tell you’! Maybe you could ask him to talk to me a little more, Bobby.”
I laughed, but now I wasn’t feeling quite so protective toward the kid. “Look, if he answers even half your questions you must keep him talking twenty-four seven. He’s trying to train you, and he’s going to do it his way. If you wind up as even half the advocate Sammariel is, you can be very, very proud of yourself.”
Clarence looked at me carefully. He was very present now, as if the discussion had helped him shake off some of the free-floating joy of Heaven. “He always sticks up for you, too. That Elvis guy said something about you once, nothing too bad even, and I thought Sam was going to hit him in the face.”
Now I did laugh. “Yeah, well, Young Elvis can be a bit of a bitch. And Sam and I go back a long way. Has he told you…?”
“That you guys were in the Counterstrike Force together? Yeah. You were Harpers or something.”
“Harps, youngster. CU Lyrae. That’s not the kind of connection you forget, and those aren’t the kind of friends you turn your back on. I’ll tell you a quick story.” We were approaching the street of shining, cloud-piercing buildings in which the Records Hall was to be found. “I was on point once on a SALT mission in Spanishtown-”
“SALT?”
“Yeah-Secure And Level Target. Which means burn it to the foundations and purify the ground with silver nitrate. We were going into a desanctified church that a group of Deniables had made their base of operations-”
“Deniables?”
“Are you going to let me tell the story, kid? Deniables are demons who’ve supposedly gone rogue. The Opposition is still running them, of course, but they can claim they’re out of control, acting on their own. And these bastards were doing some bad, bad shit in that part of Spanishtown. Three possessions among children in the neighborhood, a rash of suicides, and a big increase in drunken fights, stabbings, family violence, you name it. They were peddling despair, and they were building their clientele by the hour.
“Anyway, I was point and Sam was our top-kick that night when we broke into San Juan Soldado. It was a bad fight, and I don’t really want to talk about it here-doesn’t quite seem right. We had pretty much wrapped it up, though, until we broke into the final chamber, the old sacristy…but they had a Deathwatch hiding there. You probably want to interrupt again. Or do you know what those are?”
Clarence shook his head.
“It’s a demon who looks like a man, but who’s made up of…well, bugs, or things that look like bugs. Beetles usually, which is where the name comes from. We already had the area enclosed with wards, so the Deathwatch wasn’t going anywhere, but he wasn’t going to surrender, either. All the pieces of him flew apart and swarmed me.” I paused for a moment. I hadn’t talked about it in a while, and it still made my stomach clench. “Oh, one thing I forgot to tell you about those bugs-they’re poison. Every single one of them sinks its little jaws into you and the pain is…well, there’s no describing it, really. Time just stops. The pain is everything. All you can do is scream and thrash, if you can even hold it together enough to do that.
“Anyway, do you know what Sam did when the Deathwatch got me? He grabbed me and wrapped his arms around me like a drunken frat boy hug. A bunch of them jumped off me and onto him, and he staggered away, carrying them with him. Then he shouted at the guy with the flamethrower to hose him down.”
“What?” Clarence looked like he was going to be sick. It raised an interesting question-did anyone ever throw up in Heaven? “What do you mean…?”
“You heard me. He told the guy to hose him down with the flamethrower.”
“But how could Sam survive that? How could his body survive it, I mean?”
“It couldn’t, of course. But he was showing me what to do. So when the guy turned the flames on him I jumped into it too, just like it was a warm shower.” I sounded glib, but it all came back as I said it, that endless, shrieking, agonizing moment that in some ways, especially during sleepless nights, had never ended. Time does not always move forward, no matter what they tell you. That kind of agony equals eternity, and that’s how long the memory would be with me. They also say that you never really remember pain. That’s bullshit too.
“You…you burned up?”
It took me a moment to push it away. “Yeah. It was the only way to stop it, the only way to kill those fucking beetles. But it was fairly quick, believe it or not-a few bad seconds, then it was all over.”
Clarence was looking around as though hoping to find evidence somewhere nearby that I was making it all up. “So, w-why didn’t Sam just use the flamethrower on you? Why did he let himself…?”
“Because he was our leader. Nothing like this had happened to us before, and he wanted us to see that Heaven was behind us. Also that he wouldn’t ask anything of us he wouldn’t do to himself. Believe me, everybody remembered. Wherever they are now, they still remember, I promise. I did, too-when I woke up in a new body, that is. Sam and I spent a while in Rebirth-see, it takes some time to get used to the new body when you go out violently like that. And while we were there…well, that’s when we got to be friends.” It was also the time Sam started doggedly drinking his new body to death, but I didn’t tell the kid that. None of his business.
