God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Well, I hadn’t even come close to fornication yet, and given my habits and experience probably wouldn’t. Furthermore I was not crazy. Finally, while Shanahan was to be found in both Flann O’Brien and John Fowles, he was not in this story, not yet.

  As I left for Snug Harbor, the clock on the ground floor sounded its routine note—a cuckoo, of course.

  Not once, but ten times.

  Why talk over the game/story with two of the lesser characters? All right, they may be interesting enough, but the plot really doesn’t revolve around them. Nathan’s God Game will not be won or lost because of what Kaila or N’Rasia does. If the author/player/creator wants to get inside the head of some of his creatures in a dream world conversation, why not Lenrau and B’Mella? After all, this is a romance, maybe a divine romance, and are they not the romantic leads? And surely Ranora is the most whimsically interesting person in the story; it is a fair bet even now, that somehow it will be her task to pull all the pieces together at the end, if they will be pulled together at all. Perhaps she will be called upon to straighten out the mess that the author/player/creator has created. So why not engage in a dream conversation with her?

  What goes on inside the head of an ilel, anyway?

  Is that not more interesting than the agonies of a middle-aged matron (slightly overweight) in a midlife identity crisis, or of a lovesick young man? Our lives are filled with such people; how many ilels have we ever met?

  In my defense (and creators always must be prepared to defend themselves—take for example the scene in Yahweh’s court when Satan, still a good angel at that late date, demands that the Creator defend his work), I must say first of all that you can’t pick the people who come to your dreams. You can see a rather ordinary-looking someone briefly on the bus or the train at night after you have seen Witness; while you’d much rather dream about the luminous Kelly McGillis, you dream instead about the ordinary someone. You take your dreams where you find them.

  Moreover, ’Rau and ’Ella are the larger-than-life romantic leads. We must learn something about them, especially about their tragic flaws and their saving strengths, but if they stretch themselves out on a psychiatrist’s couch and bare their souls to us, it’s pretty hard for them to be romantic heroes.

  I have no idea what goes on in the mind of an ilel, and I’m not sure I want to know. Mostly, I think, on the basis of a sample of one, they operate on instinct and intuition. Probably they are like totally geeky when it comes to self-analysis.

  Besides, I don’t want that one intruding in my dreams. No way.

  So, OK, I have some resistance to letting them into my dreams, which is probably why they didn’t come or maybe why I suppressed the conversations I had with them. I had no particular resistance to Kaila and N’Rasia, both of whom had powerful motivation for demanding that the story/game/ world be modified to take into account their desires, the former for a woman he wanted, the latter for a more important life.

  Already, I’m sure, N’Rasia was having second thoughts. And if it should work out that Kaila really does bed the ilel, he’ll have second, third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. But they both wanted to push their way into my story and change it. So they pushed their way into my dreams, with what outcome remains to be seen.

  Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest and relaxation. Definitely not a day for working on stories or playing exhausting games. So I sailed, swam, skied, slept, and made a supper of “uncle burgers” for a horde of my nieces and nephews who had descended upon Grand Beach for the wondrous blue-skied, white-foamed perfection of a summer Sunday, the kind of day which heaven had better be like or I’ll organize a petition of protest.

  Michele and Bobby joined us for supper, the former to have her favorite repast of French fries and Tab. She was going off to Ohio next weekend to see her boyfriend, the gentle-souled linebacker, and she took a lot of teasing about it. The crowd departed my house quite late, the cars sped through the tree-covered dusk for the expressways and the rush home. Unresolved and unresolvable question: do you return to the city very late Sunday night or very early Monday morning, and the routine Sunday melancholy—with its hint of autumn—slipped over the village. Summer, we all knew it but didn’t want to face it, could not last forever.

  Should I play the game?

  It was still Sunday.

  But if I put in a few hours on it, I might be able to clean it up on Monday morning before lunch and turn my attention to better things than Nathan’s latest gimmickry.

  Author’s Note

  Not only the Hindus and the American Indians think that it all may be a dream—a possibility which our bumptious narrator refuses to take seriously. Consider this from an American humorist:

  “Strange that you should not have suspected, years ago, centuries, ages, aeons ago! for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fictions! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths golden rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the reponsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him!…

  “You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible, except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream marks are all present—you should have recognized them earlier …

  “It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And you are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

  See what I mean by humorist? Laugh, I thought I’d die.

  Presumably Mark Twain felt quite pleased with himself when he thus ended his last story “The Mysterious Stranger.” But even the narrator of this tale, who is no philosophical sophisticate as the reader doubtless perceives by now, would point out that you can’t have a dream without a dreamer, a thought without a thinker, a story without a storyteller. Nor can you tell a story without a purpose, even if as in the case of the elderly and bitter Twain, the purpose is to insist that there is no purpose.

  Thus the one whom my narrator calls Shags is probably right: our lives are stories which God tells, thoughts which God thinks, dreams which God dreams.

  The issue then is not whether there is a Dreamer. The issue rather—and the data are ambiguous—is whether dreams come true.

  10

  Ranora’s Plot

  So I turned on all the equipment, including this time the video recorder, and pressed the CONTINUE GAME key.

  SITUATION? I asked.

  NO APPRECIABLE CHANGE. NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUING SLOWLY.

  OK. I decided to have a look around.

  The various working commissions were still meeting, struggling slowly with the convoluted, and mostly unreal, problems created by centuries of fear and distrust. Kaila and Malvau met in one ducal pavilion or the other at the end of each day to tote up the progress, sometimes minute but better than before when there had been nothi
ng. The Duke and the Duchess had withdrawn completely from negotiations and even from public appearances. B’Mella, still embarrassed by the idiocy she had displayed the night N’Rasia was injured, was devoting her time to painting—fierce, passionate mountain landscapes, often with wild and destructive storms raging over the peaks and down the valleys. I had not witnessed their stormy season yet, didn’t in fact know they had one till I peered over her shoulder and watched her bring the storms to life. They looked as if they would more than satisfy my passion for summer storms.

  Wearing a short brown paint-smeared smock, B’Mella worked with precise intensity; she waved off distractions with a brisk hand, ignored the pain which fell on her long legs, and nodded curtly at the end of the day when the exhausted Malvau reported on the day’s work for peace.

  ACCESS DUKE, I instructed the program.

  SEARCHING.

  COME ON.

  SEARCHING.

  We finally found him, deep in the forest wandering about like a man in a trance. Mad Sweeney from the Irish sagas, not quite turned into a bird yet and not quite matter for a Seamus Heaney poem or a Flann O’Brien novel, but living already in another and more pleasant world. His face was transformed by a happy smile and he ambled contentedly through the blossoming trees.

  Yet not quite as mad as mad Sweeney. When Ranora raced through the forest like a gazelle fleeing from a predator, grabbed his hand, and turned him back towards the meadow, he came quietly enough. They chatted enthusiastically about the birds and the trees and the forest animals; Ranora called forth with her pipe some giant, gentle white furry creatures which looked like oversized orangutans, and which danced merrily and with surprising grace to her tunes.

  She certainly didn’t seem worried that the Duke might, like Sweeney, turn into a bird and fly around the countryside complaining about his fate.

  In their recreation pool, Kaila recounted to the Duke the meagre progress of the day on one of the fishery disputes. Lenrau’s questions indicated that he knew more about fishing than any of the negotiators. An able Duke, for a few minutes, then he closed his eyes and floated blissfully on the water—until Ranora like an avenging water sprite dove in and dunked both of them, Kaila quickly and efficiently and the Duke at great length and with considerable squirming and wrestling.

  She skillfully managed to keep the Duke between herself and her Protector at almost all times, yet she laughed affectionately at him and asked if he was going to walk by the moonlight with G’Ranne.

  He blushed. “She is not my kind of woman, impudent child.”

  “Hmmf…” she sniffed skeptically, apparently only mildly upset that her protector might be having a love affair. “And did the Duchess look lovely today?”

  “We never see the Duchess. She is in her chamber painting.”

  “Painting!” Arms on the edge of the pool, little feet kicking water in the Duke’s face, enough to tease, not enough to offend. “The Duchess paints and the Duke daydreams.”

  “And neither stands in the way of peace with their ill-tempered behavior.”

  “While the priests plot, and the warriors sharpen their weapons, and the people grow tired of the negotiations and wish there was some entertaining war to keep them interested as spring turns to summer. We will not have peace,” vigorous splash of water, hitting the Duke right between the eyes, “until this sleepy Duke and that painting Duchess realize that they have to impose it!”

  The Duke grabbed her around her tiny waist and dunked her repeatedly. “You have only one topic on your mind, troublesome child.”

  She loved it, of course, as all teenaged girls love to be dunked. “I bet,” sputtering for air, “that you wouldn’t do this,” more sputtering and fiddling with her swimsuit top, also part of the act, “to ’Ella if you had her in the pool.”

  “If I did,” laughter as he finally released her, “she might cut my throat.”

  All the while, Kaila watched with melancholy longing. I hoped that G’Ranne would take his mind off the ilel for a short time on this glorious spring evening.

  ACCESS CARDINAL.

  The Cardinal and the Admiral, this time, were happily free of the Mothers Superior. Still the subject was murder, not “the razor’s the boy” as Shanahan suggested but, stylo curiae, the knife in the back.

  “We must stop these negotiations,” the Admiral insisted, pounding the wall of the cave in which they were meeting. “Put a knife in Malvau or Kaila or maybe both.”

  “Pity that those drunken louts didn’t kill both him and his wife,” the Cardinal murmured in his usual richly pious voice. “That would have restrained them nicely.”

  “Two quick jabs some night and we’re rid of both of them.”

  “There is no useful purpose served by using that technique at the present time. Murder is only appropriate when we can be sure that it will be effective. Those two young fools are both so indiscreet that they might liquidate all of us.”

  “If they should mate, which is not altogether impossible?”

  “Oh,” the Cardinal smiled gently, “that will solve many of our problems. Yes,” his smile widened, “then it will be very simple.”

  Not if I can help it, buster.

  My friends the technological warriors had traded in their cave in the mountains for an island on one of the larger lakes and their mechanical cannon for test tubes, retorts, and steaming vats.

  “What if it explodes before we are ready to use it?”

  “Then there will be no more island.”

  “And if we are on the island?”

  “No more us. It will probably not explode, not till we have it under the table on which they will sign the final peace.”

  “It will destroy the meadow and everyone in it?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “What else?”

  “Possibly both cities.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Possibly the whole land.”

  “And us?”

  “Where would we be but in the land?”

  They laughed insanely, a chorus which was joined by the half-dozen white-gowned assistants.

  ZAP LAB.

  HOW ZAP?

  BREAK IT UP ANY WAY YOU WANT.

  The program was becoming ingenious in its destructive techniques.

  One steaming test tube flashed red and white and green and broke open with a loud pop. The retort next to it cracked and spewed a dark amber fluid which ate into a rubberlike hose. Two more tubes began to flash as a thick black substance gushed out of the hose.

  The experimenters raced desperately for the doors of their hut and then out into the small meadow in the middle of the island. The hut was smoking like a Fourth of July firecracker about to blow.

  And then it blew—poof, no more hut, no more island, and a bunch of conspirators paddling desperately for shore. Where the island had been there was a tiny mushroom cloud.

  I started to be very worried about these clowns. They might have stumbled upon something far more deadly than they realized.

  My final stop for the evening was Malvau’s pavilion. He and his wife were eating their dinner and companionably discussing the day’s conferences in exquisite detail, he explaining patiently what had happened, she listening with apparent interest and asking careful and seemingly intelligent questions

  He was exhausted, a business executive who hadn’t had a vacation in years. She was pale and thinner, but seemingly recovered from her brush with death.

  After their meal they walked briefly in the moonlight, holding hands passively, returned to their chamber, and offered together their nighttime prayer to the Lord Our God, looking right into the big screen on my Zenith.

  “We thank you for saving our lives,” he began.

  “And bringing peace to our land,” she continued. A bump on the head and loss of appetite had done wonders for her figure.

  “And especially renewing our love.”

  “We pray for the Duke and the Duchess.”

  �
�And all who labor in the cause of peace.”

  “We are especially grateful” (together) “for the ilel whom you have sent to us in our time of need.”

  “And,” a light laugh from the woman, “for her wondrous pipe.”

  They waited, expecting me to say something.

  What the hell?

  BE KIND TO ONE ANOTHER, I said, feeling that such advice never did harm to anyone.

  They were sweetly affectionate to one another in their bath and then began elegiac ministrations to each other’s bodies in their bed.

  I tuned out, suspicious. It was too perfect, too considerate, too affectionate. Malvau had a porcelain doll on his hands, one whose theme had been celebrated by the magic elfkind; N’Rasia, having obtained her starring role, was trying to figure out what it meant. The change from middle-aged matron to peace symbol was not quite as satisfying as she might have hoped.

  For neither of them was there room to fight. You can’t be happy in an intimate relationship unless you have a protocol and a rhetoric with which to fight constructively. So, if you want to keep your new relationship alive, you contain any emotions which are too passionate.

  Passionate lovers fight passionately. Elegiac lovers don’t fight. After a time, they either don’t love or a volcano explodes between them. The latter is more dangerous and more constructive.

  Did either of them have the resources to fight explosively and constructively?

  It certainly didn’t look that way.

  I decided to leave G’Ranne and Kaila to themselves. Like ‘Nora I didn’t care at that point whether they were sleeping with each other or not.

  I suspended the game and thought about that part of the plot. The ice warrior, if no longer ice maiden, was attractive and intelligent and, for a warrior woman, remarkably unferocious. She and Kaila would make a good match. Might that not be a happy solution?

  Ranora, like Shane, could walk over the mountain, piping her happy little tune.