This had to be stopped. But before Santa could take his first step forward, Gregor found his voice. “I’ll see you all in hell for this,” he shouted. “You have no call to humiliate a fellow elf thus. I declare this community stone-cold dead, its bonds of fealty shattered.” With these words, his exasperation broke and he fled the proceedings, snow kicking up at his heels as he dashed between the trees and fell and righted himself, a diminishing figure in green, his cap’s jingle bell ringing sharp and high as it jounced upon his head.
A few elves jeered after him, but mostly, and all at once, they fell silent. Knecht Rupert and Gustav let the sheet drop and climbed down from the trees, caps in hand, acting sheepish and ashamed.
Wendy gave Santa a look of anguish.
“No need to doff your caps, lads,” said Santa, stepping forward. “I sense you were driven to extremes. I sense as well that Gregor had it coming.”
“He did, Santa,” said Fritz, “though I regret it went so far.”
Santa nodded. “Your behavior, as his, I find very odd indeed. Later, you will unfold the tale to me, I will meet with Gregor on my own and smooth things over, after which I will apply myself heart and soul to fixing what I hadn’t known was broken. Meanwhile, I want you and Herbert to pursue Gregor. Find him, ask his forgiveness, entreat him to a peace. Bless him, Herbert. And give him my assurance—the assurance of all here assembled—that he shall not for more than one brief hour be outcast from this community, but be welcomed warmly into its fold and brought most gently to see the error of his ways.”
“We will, Santa,” said Fritz, and he and Herbert headed off along the erratic snow trail blazed by Gregor’s hasty departure. Other elves clustered about Engelbert and Josef to comfort them.
For a moment, all was gloom about Santa’s heart. But he shook it off, determined that the celebration would proceed as planned.
* * *
As Wendy listened to Santa’s fresh recounting to his helpers of their recent extraordinary Christmas Eve and his introduction of her, she vowed to make Gregor and Josef and Engelbert a special dessert, chocolate mousse perhaps or crème brulee, delivered with the kindest words of which she was capable. Gregor had always frightened her a little. But now she had seen, as had they all, the confused little boy beneath the bully, and she felt the need to comfort him in some way.
Applause broke out, more vigorous than was strictly warranted. Good. They weren’t about to bear Gregor a grudge. Wendy expected no less. “Thank you,” she said, raising her hands to quiet them. “Santa, of course, made all those millions of insertions. My role was merely to hold the divine egg-seed; Santa’s, to shape and place its clone just so in their hearts, knowing them with a quick intimacy, flaws and all, so that the implant precisely met their needs. Applause, please, for the good Saint Nicholas.”
Again the crowd thundered their approval.
Santa laughed and blushed and waved it away.
“All right, then,” said Wendy. “The egg-seeds have taken a dog’s age to germinate, have they not? But our patience is about to be rewarded. Easter morning, when our visitants wake, we shall taste the first fruits of our labor. But this day, Good Friday, their growth is sufficiently advanced to allow us to glimpse the future.”
Then Wendy touched that place inside her, unvisited for months, where her powers of projection dwelt.
“Jamie Stratton first. Recall, he was fated to throw himself into oncoming traffic. Let’s see what he’ll be doing instead on that day at that precise moment.”
But nothing came up, nothing at all.
“Hmm, just a minute, I’ll find him.”
Nothing the year before, nor the year before that.
“This is ridiculous, I...no, Daddy, I’m okay. Let’s start with Easter and scan from there, shall we?”
There lay Jamie in his bed two mornings from now, blinking sleep away, a look of sheer terror spreading its pall over his face. Wendy leaped ahead, random glimpses into his life projected large before the assembly. Snippets of sneers and harsh words flew all about, and four days into this bleak world, Jamie was ambushed by young toughs from school and bludgeoned to death. Wendy was in shock. What was this world he had awakened to? She opened the floodgates to it. There, projected before them, was an inferno of chaos and hatred, of men and women who condemned others upon the instant and meted out death as easily as a look of scorn. Strange fruit sprouted on tree limbs and lampposts. Beneath a barrage of fear, imagination was curtailed and joyously anarchic creativity clamped down upon. But paranoia ran wild and with good reason. Projections of inner uncertainty flew out to cloak strangers, leading swiftly to degrees of inhospitality which did not stop at beatings or ostracism but went straight to murder and mass graves. Life became cheap; or rather, the judgment of a stern god, stern beyond the worst human imaginings, led to its utter devaluation before an overriding myth of eternal life in heaven or in hell. But hell was unacceptable, and to earn heaven meant to be this false god’s deputy and dispatch those even suspected of being unable to control their ungodly desires. Beasts these sinners had become, and beasts were meant for slaughter and sacrifice.
Wendy swooned. When she came to, she found herself cradled in Santa’s arms. The projections had ceased. Rachel, wearing a fretful look, had her palm pressed against Wendy’s forehead. “Stay back, all of you,” said Santa, but Wendy took comfort in their closeness.
“I’m all right,” she assured Anya, who knelt beside her and said, “There, there, child.” But she had misplaced the soothing grandma face that went with those words.
And Wendy was suddenly not all right at all. Sobs bubbled out of her. It felt as if she had lost her footing on a tightrope over a vast canyon and was falling to her death.
Then Santa leaped to his feet and shouted into the heavens with a desperate cry. “Michael! If ever we needed you, we need you now, and at once!”
* * *
One moment, the archangel has been one with the plenum divinum, his mercurial mind shifting from bliss to bliss, as in a lucid dream where instantly fulfilled whims convey the dreamer from one perfection to another. The next, a Clausean shout rang in his ears and he found himself hurtling, before he realized he had willed it, downward toward a snowy clearing at the North Pole.
This incessant summoning was growing a bit tiresome, as far as he was concerned. But a vow could not be gainsaid.
The whole community had gathered about a stricken Wendy. Beside her stood Santa, eyes upraised, demanding his presence. At the abrupt splash of heavenly light emanating from him, the elves, Santa’s family, even flickers perched in the treetops and snow hares and foxes lightfooting it through the underbrush, stared upward in wonder.
“Trouble, Santa?”
“You bet there’s trouble,” said the red-suited fellow. “Take a look at the implants. Look at Easter morning, and beyond.”
Puzzled at Santa’s distress, Michael turned to examine the world, scrutinizing with angelic precision the about-to-sprout potential that waited in millions of hearts, the mayhem shortly to be unleashed, and the orientation—dear God, the orientation—of the egg-seeds. He was stunned. “They’re upended. Every one of them.”
It was Santa’s fault. But how could that be? Michael’s instructions had been exact and Santa had been nothing if not meticulous in carrying them out.
“I placed them precisely as you said I should.”
“I’m sure you did. But how...?”
At that moment, Michael noticed Gronk at the edge of the gathering and two thoughts clashed like shiny brass cymbals in his mind. The first of them comprehended all, Gronk listening unobserved, the Tooth Fairy slipping in and doing irreparable harm. But the second he found far more disturbing. When he had conceived of the egg-seed, he had created an ovoid polarity, a big end and a small end, a right and a wrong orientation, the possibility—and now the inevitability—of a horrendous foul up. Why had he done that? Why?
“The point is,” said Santa, “the clock is ticking. Hum
ankind, it would appear, is doomed. What are you going to do about it?”
There must be no further discussion in front of the imp. That much was clear. Spines of heat bit into the base of Michael’s brain. Fixing this would require nothing less than a miracle. Somewhere in there, he would be punished. How could he not be? I’ll throw myself on his mercy, he thought. Kowtow. Grovel. Accept demotion to plain old limp-winged angel.
Whatever course Michael chose, it had to be swift.
“Come,” he said. And out of the multitude, he plucked Santa and Wendy. Below them, ever dwindling, stood rapt in marvel Santa’s helpers, his wives, and the invisible imp, as Michael folded his wings about the stricken pair and sped heavenward.
Chapter 31. A Plea to the Soul of Creation
ONE MOMENT, WENDY HAD BEEN overcome with the horror of what she and Santa had unwittingly unleashed, the terror that, in less than forty-eight hours, would engulf the planet. The next, she and her father found themselves tucked beneath the quintessence of softness, shooting through the stratosphere straight toward the Empyrean. She felt toasty warm and perfectly safe, breathing free without a care and giggling at the wondrous expanses through which they passed.
I ought to feel shame, thought Wendy. Catastrophe would shortly strike the mortal world, all because she and Santa had underestimated the forces arrayed against them and the need to continually verify their results. Instead, she felt giddy and blessed and forgiven in advance, not simply by God but by the whole of suffering humanity, by her stepfather, and most importantly by herself. She had to assume, from Santa’s laughter and his boyish glee, that his burden of guilt had been likewise lifted.
“Will you two kindly shut up?” came Michael’s gentle suggestion. “I’m trying to think.”
That set them off all over again. Each angelic syllable blessed them in myriad ways, despite the urgency in Michael’s voice.
“Fine, fine, laugh away,” he said. “I’ll just close my ears to every last chortle and guffaw, and focus more intently.”
So permitted, Santa pealed forth with great rolling gales of laughter, and Wendy set loose high-pitched squeals of her own. If this was what the journey to heaven was like, she regretted her immortality. For the acceptance, the perfection, the beauty that greeted her senses at every turn kept increasing. When the limit seemed to have been reached, they quantum’d higher. How could she love Santa more than she already did? And yet she did, over and over and over.
“Isn’t it wondrous?”
“Oh my word yes it is,” replied Santa. “Look there, and there.” Everywhere about them rose up marvels, stars and comets and galaxies and great clusters of celestial phenomena. Then began clouds, not the earthly kind, no. For these clouds were made of condensed bliss, and on each one perched and plucked an angel with a harp and an O’d mouth from which issued forth the purest ode to joy. Each was unique, each perfect, berobed in simple finery yet unclothed and revealed without guile or guise.
They grew more numerous and ever closer together until, if it had been a human gathering, Wendy would have worried about colliding with one of them. But this was like passing through a thousand-voiced Bach fugue, always room for one more melodic thread, with nary a sense of excess. At last, they rose into a space intimate yet infinite, and there at its center sat enthroned, oh mercy, it was the Father, just as he had appeared in the Chapel to marry Santa and Mommy and Anya, but he looked ever so much more at home here. To his right stood his Son, and Wendy thought with a giggle, I’ve died and gone to heaven. And she was half right.
When God looked up from his conversation to make eye contact with her, absolute calm and wonder claimed her, all comprehensible emotion utterly transcended.
* * *
God’s first thought when he saw Michael flying so swiftly toward him was, Again the bumbler. Whatever was he about, bringing two of the earthbound immortals to heaven? And not simply to heaven, but here, where all that ever was, or shall be, is masterminded?
Then he observed the creatures beneath the archangel’s wing and admired his handiwork. Even in their perceived imperfections, they were perfect, the child he had resurrected into immortality and the master toymaker who had once been king of the satyrs.
“Michael has a good excuse,” said the Son.
“Which I’m sure,” said the Father, “we’re about to hear. From the beginning I knew we would, and from the beginning you knew I knew. But never mind all that. I only wish he weren’t about to grovel and gush so.”
But grovel and gush he did. “O most Holy,” said he, having left his charges free to stare and gape and marvel in each other’s arms, “I have majorly messed up this time. Giddy with the success of saving one small boy, I tried to universalize, all on my own. I thought that this effort too would achieve success, that once that success was realized, you would cast your great orbs upon it with delight and be proud of me. But, oh forgive me, Lord, forgive me and please, please make it right, you see what a mess I’ve made, what woes are shortly to be unleashed among mortals because of my botched efforts at reform.” He was on his knees, and now his halo’d head fell before the Master’s feet in abject humility.
God made a great show. He pretended to be startled and upset at what he observed on earth. Yet though he railed mightily, he cushioned the effect on those observing him, especially the newcomers, lest they be stricken unto death. “You did what?” thundered he. “And without my permission? O perverse and o’erstepping angel, I ought to strip you of your wings, I ought to fling from your head that halo and banish you to the outskirts of heaven with nary a hope of glimpsing me more, yea not from afar. You dared, without even grudging assent, to challenge—nay dismantle—a fundamental perversity of this my most wondrous creation, to whit, the temptation which besets mortals, in even the smallest matter, to pretend godlike judgment over their fellows. Do you not suppose there is a balance to all this, and a rather delicate one at that?”
“Father, don’t be upset,” said the Son.
“How can I not be? Observe the corruption in their souls. How could I ever have created them with the potential to go so wrong? And now, capping all, the festering pustule introduced into so many of them last December is about to burst open and overwhelm the planet! I blame not you, Santa. Nor you, Wendy. But Michael? Oh, thou art in a heap of trouble. Well dost thou cower, well doth thy bones quake before the Lord thy God.”
“Please make it right,” said Michael. “Undo it, I beg you.”
“Ah yes, with a sweep of my all-powerful hand, I am to reverse it, am I? I’m to kiss the owie and make it better. Well, I’m going to make you sweat. In fact, I’m going to turn to other matters. There’s far too much to oversee in the running of this vast universe to spare one more thought to the impending ruin of the human race. I have all the time in the world. I can always begin again, if need be. But that would be a lousy way for their story to end, I suppose. This calls for delegation. Son, I delegate you, if you’re so inclined.”
“Of course, Father. I accept.”
God admired his boy’s doe-eyes. He, once Dionysus, now Christ, infinite in compassion, good cop to his father’s bad—he would devise means to achieve a satisfactory resolution. Another feather in his cap, a new cause for renown, something to make his mother proud. “Find a way,” he commanded. “Take these two immortals and find a way.”
“So I shall.”
“As for you, Michael mischievous, stay here and grovel some more. It’s good for the soul, this contrition, even in archangels; and I like lording it over you.”
In the distance, he watched his Son confer with Santa and Wendy. And though his attention was, as usual, everywhere, not scattered but razor-sharp upon every infinitesimal nook and cranny of creation, he also focused entirely on the abject penitent, enjoying the elaborate rollout of his own towering wrath and Michael’s torment most majestic.
* * *
The journey to heaven had been exhilarating. But now, as Santa witnessed God’s condemnation
of the archangel, sobriety and terror held sway in his heart. If the Father refused to undo the terrible perversion his deliveries had undergone, he would remain forever the bringer of ruin to all humankind.
But when the Son accepted the task of addressing the issue, it eased his upset, though doubts arose. Wouldn’t the Son be too soft for this task? He was gentle, loving, and kind, a shepherd to his sheep. Weren’t the Father’s bluster and thunder needed to reverse the Tooth Fairy’s misdeeds? Nonviolence was all well and good, but fixing so great a problem would surely require some healing counter-violence. How could parables, the spouting of pious and unworkable beatitudes, the doffing of dusty sandals and the ceremonial washing of feet, be enough?
“Take heart,” Santa told Wendy, but his words lacked conviction.
Then the Son came to them. And his look also said, Take heart. And Santa’s spirits brightened at the presence of this being who had sacrificed everything for humankind.
Wendy gasped in wonder beside him.
“Santa,” said he, “let us take counsel with one another. Wendy, dear heart, abide awhile as I walk aside with this worthy saint. Be comforted and know that thou art blessed.”
“Um, okay,” she managed.
At once Santa and the Son stood apart, facing one another in what felt like a meeting of equals. Even so, to stand before the greatest of all sacrificers exposed Santa’s generosity as but a pale copy of what he observed.
“We have a crisis,” came the Son’s assured voice.
“We do. And I—”
“Have done with apology. Michael meant well, though he made the egg-seed reversible. Interesting, that. You and Wendy did the proper and generous thing, a grand gesture blocked by the Tooth Fairy’s desire for revenge. Your failure to observe the progress of seed and sprout was entirely innocent. No blame. If I wanted to blame anyone, there would be plenty of mortals upon which to cast it.”
Santa nodded. “I have seen into their hearts. So many buried children beneath the greed and envy and self-righteousness. We thought to tweak one small area of prejudice, yet it sobered me—beyond what I revealed to Wendy—to witness close-up such a dark inheritance of folly and ignorance.”
Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes Page 24
