God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  And then so did everyone else.

  What a twenty-four hours for the poor woman—orgy, triumph, celebration, fierce fight, knock on the head, and then a recall from the grave.

  Well, she wanted to be something more than a minor subplot, didn’t she?

  It probably would take her a long time to recover completely. Too many vulnerabilities at one time. For the moment, however, that was her problem. I suspended the game. For a time, at any rate, they didn’t need me.

  By the way, and for the record, they never did find out which side the warrior assailants were from. Later B’Mella admitted as much, with what I thought was a notable lack of graciousness.

  I drove into Michigan City to visit Joan Hagan. She too was conscious, but dazed and unsmiling. She looked hauntingly lovely, a Violetta in the final scenes of the final act.

  Her husband, his usual noisy bluster gone, sat next to her, holding a totally unresponsive hand.

  “It was a freak accident, Father. They only wanted her purse. She stumbled and fell as they yanked it away from her. If the police catch them, they will will probably call it attempted murder.”

  “I don’t remember a thing,” she said dully. “I don’t think I had that many drinks.”

  “Only two. The blow on the head, the doctor told me, will make you forget what happened for a long time.”

  Forget consciously, but the terror of the mugging will remain in your unconscious, just as will the terror of the assault on your cognate will remain in her unconscious. Somehow the two of you will have to deal with what you cannot even remember.

  Was it two attacks or only one?

  I must emphasize that, except for Tom Hagan’s silver hair and Joan’s blond streaked with gray and the fact that they are both handsome people, there is little physical resemblance between them and my friends on the other side of Herr Planck’s Wall. Tom is shorter, less dignified, but more of a lighthearted comic than Malvau. His wife is thinner, more ethereal, and much less earthy than N’Rasia. They have six children instead of three. The strain in their marriage is less created by a blend of pompousness and shallowness than that caused by a little boy who refuses to grow up and a stiff, somber woman who was never a little girl and refuses to become one even when she should, mostly, alas, because she doesn’t know how.

  “Things were going so well for us,” she said, “except I can’t remember how or why.”

  “It’ll come back, no rush.” He patted the hand tenderly and sympathetically. “We have lots of time.”

  “I’m not sure we do.”

  I wasn’t sure either. But I insisted that God always gave as much time as we needed.

  Does S/He now? As the Irish would say.

  I was afraid that the blow on the head might have knocked the emergent little girl out permanently.

  One blow on the head or two? Had my port, I wondered, made it possible for the attack on Joan Hagan to cause the attack on N’Rasia? Or vice versa? Did one marriage have to survive if the other was to survive? Or was it all merely coincidence?

  At that point I was leaning pretty much to a mechanistic view of the relationship between the two worlds. Since then I have rejected that interpretation in favor of a more elaborate and complex one which sees spiritual influences bouncing back and forth in intricate and unpredictable patterns.

  Consider that last sentence: it’s a masterpiece of academic scholarship. What does it really say? Not a hell of a lot.

  It says I don’t know how the two cosmoi affect one another; they do, but I haven’t been able to figure out how or why. I don’t know and probably I’ll never know.

  But no scholar will ever admit ignorance in quite so candid a fashion, not unless he’s trying to tell an honest story like this one. So we make up sentences about elaborate and complex interpretations of intricate and unpredictable patterns of spiritual influences.

  Practically, all I know is that Tom and Joan in our world and Malvau and N’Rasia in the other cosmos were unconsciously linked with each other. Their problems and their possibilities were cognates. Grace and ungrace flowed back and forth, sometimes helping, sometimes hurting. But neither couple, I now firmly believe, determined the outcome of the other couple’s “subplot.”

  I was responsible, more or less, for the subplot across the wall; the Other Person, presumably, was responsible for the subplot on this side of the wall.

  But that makes it too simple, doesn’t it? Since I’m telling the whole story, I’m cooperating with the Other Person on both sides of the wall, in different ways because on this side Tom and Joan are not really part of Nathan’s God Game—as computer program, anyway.

  I said three paragraphs back that neither couple was conscious of the flow of grace and ungrace back and forth. But if I am to be precise I must modify that statement. There were certainly strange things happening in Grand Beach those weeks and especially that weekend.

  The folks in the other cosmos, less reflective and self-conscious, didn’t seem to be aware of a reverse flow of influence. But that may not be altogether true either, as I will have occasion to note shortly.

  As I drove out of Michigan City on U.S. 12, I noticed for maybe the millionth time a sign that said, “Leaving LaPorte County.”

  That hit me kind of hard. LaPorte, a town down by I-90, is very old. The Catholic church was built in 1852 and, alas, covered by stone a couple of decades ago. The town received its name because it was on a strip of prairie between the Great American Forest to the south and the Dune Forest to the north, through which the very early settlers came, and the Indians before them. It was the gate to the prairies and the world beyond.

  Presumably it was merely an accidental juxtaposition of names. Two utterly different kinds of gates. If there was a juxtaposed cosmos in our neighborhood, it was there long before the forests came into being and before the name LaPorte was given to the town and the county. Anyway, Grand Beach is not in LaPorte County. Still …

  We had Mass as always on Saturday in my parlor. I preached about two of my favorite characters, who appear in a novel about a novel, too, named Finnbar the Fair, Emperor of All the World and Everything Else Besides, and his girlfriend, Countess Deirdre the Dark, who works after school at McDonald’s selling Big Macs. Deirdre was fed up with how dull the colors were in the Empire, so she made Finny—who is also the greatest wizard in all the world—take her on a trip to lands which were in different colors, a red world, a green world, and so forth. I was, of course, stealing from G. K. Chesterton’s colored lands. Finally they come to a world where all the colors are perfect and Deirdre claps her hands for joy. Then they turn the corner and what do they see?

  All the little Goggin kids watch with big blue eyes. No, what do they see?

  Deirdre’s McDonald’s. The end of all our search is to return to where we started and know it for the first time.

  I don’t remember what the gospel was, to tell you the truth, but it’s a good story and kids love it. I figure if you can tell a story the kids like, you’ve talked to everyone else in the congregation too. We prayed, since there were astronauts traveling in space at the time, for those who traveled between worlds. I had other intentions in mind, needless to say.

  The point in repeating the homily is to record that, while I was under strain certainly and worried about my characters surely, I was not yet a blithering basket case. I was, rather, carrying on my normal summer-vacation routine with people who didn’t notice any particular change in me or if they did, like Michele and her mother, they figured I was busy with one of my stories again.

  Which of course was true, but it was a different kind of story. It was Nathan’s God Game.

  The Brennans were staging one of their Saturday night dinners, not only for invited guests, but streams of teenagers related in various ways to the four adolescent Brennans. Even for the usual standard of fun-filled evenings at the Brennans’, it was a magically joyous evening.

  The meal had hardly started when, no drink having been t
aken, I announced that I could create a better Archdiocese of Chicago than God had. In fact, I had already done so. In my fictional Archdiocese, Sean Cronin, a man of courage, honesty, and integrity, was Cardinal Archbishop, and Blackie Ryan, wise, gentle, insightful, was Rector of the Cathedral.

  “God,” I said firmly, “hasn’t done nearly so well.”

  “Maybe he has more obstacles,” Jeanine Brennan observed.

  A point, I suppose, well taken.

  9

  Another Visitor

  That night seemed a perfectly normal Saturday evening at Grand Beach in the summer, less harried than some, but if I had not been alerted by Rich’s comment in the drugstore that morning I would not have speculated about energies rushing back and forth through the port.

  Even then I was not ready for what happened next.

  Why not close off the port and protect Grand Beach from possible harm?

  A perfectly good question; that I didn’t ask it indicates how deeply I was involved in the game/story despite my externally normal behavior. Besides, thus far there was no reason to think Grand Beach was in danger, was there?

  Today I’m inclined to think that while both grace and ungrace can pass back and forth between neighboring cosmoi, the energies are normally either benign or sufficiently weak as to do no serious harm. Joan Hagan had not been badly hurt, not nearly as seriously as poor N’Rasia. Moreover, if we are truly juxtaposed in a close, tenement-house superuniverse with another cosmos, one temporarily wider port is not going to increase notably the flow of spiritual energies between cognates in the two cosmoi.

  It is perhaps a self-serving view of things, but it does seem to fit the data. Were things a little different in Grand Beach that weekend? OK, if Rich Daley says they were, then they were not greatly different, not so much that anyone besides a gifted political leader could notice.

  If Grand Beach were under assault, I could always pull the plug, couldn’t I?

  Besides, who knows how much energy may have leapt back and forth over Planck’s Wall every weekend of every summer for ages in that spot on the shore of Lake Michigan? It is not unreasonable to assume that the port was always there, in some less-defined fashion than my electronic linkup had temporarily created.

  Nothing happened to Grand Beach, did it, that would not have happened anyway?

  Well, maybe with one exception. And that may prove the speculation in the next paragraph.

  There is another possibility that I was not considering at the time and which may be very important. If there was any sense or plan in all of this strange affair of the leaks in Max Planck’s Wall created by Nathan’s God Game, the key theme might be that finally the critical energy was curvilinear, like a boomerang. Or, to change the metaphor, maybe Grand Beach was a transformer on the energy circuit. Or to try yet again, perhaps it was the prism that refracted lights back to the other cosmos.

  Arguably, as you shall see, just in the nick of time.

  Well, the Brennans walked me home after the dinner party, as they always do. I felt quite relaxed and unworried. Joan Hagan was fine. N’Rasia was recovering. The peace negotiations and the romance between B’Mella and Lenrau were back on track. I was in control again of my material, so in control that I could enjoy the usual summer Saturday evening in Grand Beach without any serious distractions.

  I had not much of the Irish Cream taken, not nearly as much as ’Rasia had in her visit, not by a long shot.

  Before I went to bed I prayed dutifully for those who traveled between worlds. I fell promptly to sleep, dormitio justorum as we used to say in the seminary.

  Now, you’re going to think that because I had N’Rasia on my mind before I went to bed, I met her again in my dreams. That would, after all, not be surprising. Maybe at some level in my consciousness, that was what I wanted, right?

  Well, when I woke up and saw someone familiar sitting at the desk which is at the other side of my room, reading of all things Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities, it was not, let me assure you, herself at all at all.

  Who was it?

  None of you will guess.

  Kaila.

  “This woman has a point, you know,” he nodded politely, every inch the well-trained and respectful courtier. “It may be that dreams are real and that the real are dreams.”

  “That’s not quite her point. She’s merely investigating the Indian stories and legends about the reality of dreams.”

  “Hmm … well, I don’t believe that she’s persuaded that dreams are just energy discharges in the brain at the end of the day. Neither are you, or I wouldn’t be in your dream.”

  “Or I in your dream.”

  “A possibility.” He smiled. “I don’t see how we can know for sure. This conversation, however, in some deep sense is certainly real, isn’t it?”

  “W. I. Thomas.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t heard of him.… Do you mind if I speak very candidly? You won’t be offended?”

  “Of course you may. You are the most courteous person in the story.”

  “So you made me,” he said grimly. “I really don’t have much choice.”

  “So you are,” I insisted. “I couldn’t make you what you’re not even if I tried.”

  “The problem,” he leaned back in my enormous desk chair, “is that I am a little too well bred to be angry at God.”

  “I’m not God; but why are you angry?”

  “Surely you know?” He looked genuinely surprised. “The ilel, of course. You don’t expect me to be pleased with you about her, do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. Anyway, I did not send her. She was there when I came. I don’t know what she’s supposed to do in the story either. I don’t even know what the word ‘ilel’ means.”

  He ran his fingers through his curly black hair. “You can hardly expect me to believe that, can you?”

  “She’s not mine. I didn’t send her. I don’t know where she came from.”

  “You will certainly admit,” his smile was sad, melancholy, forlorn, “that you made her what she is? She’s part of your story. You make all the characters to be what you imagine them to be. You made that delightful little creature delightful because you wanted her to be that way. That’s why I’m upset with you. Didn’t you realize I’d fall in love with her? How could I not have fallen in love with her?”

  “Perhaps,” I said guardedly, “you have a point.”

  “It was not till you intervened that I began to find her sexually appealing.” He drummed his long, artistic fingers on the side of my word processor. “You are well aware of that, are you not? With all respect and reverence, of course.”

  “You’d like to blow your stack at me, wouldn’t you, Kaila? You’re furious because you think I dealt you a bad hand and you want to rant at me, but your good manners and your charm get in the way.”

  He laughed and shifted in the chair. “What good would it do me? Have I not told others that there is no sense in being angry at the Lord Our God? If you choose to make me a shadow in your picture, will protesting do me any good? I think more might be accomplished by reasonable conversation between…”

  “Colleagues?”

  “I would not dare use the word.” His scholarly methodology was not mine, but he’d make a good graduate student and more respectful than most.

  “Let me set the record straight. I don’t know where she comes from any more than you do. I didn’t send her. The Other Person did that. She’s a character in my story, so I guess I’m responsible, partly anyway, for her outrageous behavior. To be candid” (good academic phrase, that) “I doubt very much that you were totally unaware of her sexual appeal before I took over.”

  “I cannot debate theology with you.” He smiled ingratiatingly. “The distinction between you and the Other Person…”

  “Maybe Other Persons…” I remembered the Trinity.

  “… Escapes me completely. I am a monotheist.”


  “So am I. So are they—the Other Persons, I mean.”

  He shook his head. “You cannot escape your responsibility for that impudent little wench.” He said the harsh words fondly. “She’s your creature now, whoever else may have sent her.”

  “And it was only in the pool that day you noticed she was not merely a little wench?”

  “At first,” he stood up and began to pace the floor, “she was a mild nuisance, a hoyden for whom I was responsible far too young in life to have a hoyden daughter. She attached herself to me as soon as she appeared. Ilels have masters and keepers—odd, isn’t it, to use those words? I certainly don’t keep her, and ’Rau surely does not master her. I knew the historical literature better than anyone else; I was patient and kind; I was the natural choice, or so everyone thought.”

  “And a little flattered … if the wandering ilel had chosen anyone else you would have been offended.”

  “I can hardly deny that, can I? At any rate, at first she was amusing—an appealing, often impudent, but in her own way, docile child. I began to enjoy having a daughter who was only a few years younger than I was, especially a sacred child who had come to save our Lord Lenrau and our land, for such is the mission of ilels.”

  “Then you discovered she was more than a child and that without realizing what had happened, you’d fallen for her.”

  “You made me do that.” Hands on hips, voice tense, he turned on me. “You needed my sexual frustration for part of the drama of your story.”

  “One of the rules of the game, Kaila.” I got out of bed and sat in the reclining chair in my #3 work station (as the decorator calls it). “An author can never force a character to do something the character doesn’t want to do. Your falling for the sexy little imp was as natural as the sun rising in the morning. Don’t blame me for your own needs and desires.”

  “You made me with those needs and desires.” He glowered darkly, and looked even more handsome.

  “You don’t want them? You want me to rewrite your healthy male reaction to a beautiful girl out of the story?”