by Rice, Anne
My song was the only sad note in Heaven, and yet the sadness was transfigured immediately into harmony, into a form of psalm or canticle, into a hymn of praise and wonder and gratitude.
I cried out. I think I cried the single word “God.” This was not a prayer or an admission, or a plea, but simply a great exclamation.
We stood in a doorway. Beyond appeared vista upon vista, and I was vaguely sensible suddenly that over the nearby balustrade there lay below the world.
The world as I had never seen it in all its ages, with all its secrets of the past revealed. I had only to rush to the railing and I could peer down into the time of Eden or Ancient Mesopotamia, or a moment when Roman legions had marched through the woods of my earthly home. I would see the great eruption of Vesuvius spill its horrid deadly ash down upon the ancient living city of Pompeii.
Everything there to be known and finally comprehended, all questions settled, the smell of another time, the taste of it—
I ran towards the balustrade, which seemed to be farther and farther away. Faster and faster I headed towards it. Yet still the distance was impossible, and suddenly I became intensely aware that this vision of Earth would be mingled with smoke and fire and suffering, and that it might utterly demolish in me the overflowing sense of joy. I had to see, however. I was not dead. I was not here to stay.
Memnoch reached out for me. But I ran faster than he could.
An immense light rose suddenly, a direct source infinitely hotter and more illuminating than the splendid light that already fell without prejudice on everything I could see. This great gathering magnetic light grew larger and larger until the world down below, the great dim landscape of smoke and horror and suffering, was turned white by this light, and rendered like an abstraction of itself, on the verge of combusting.
Memnoch pulled me back, throwing up his arms to cover my eyes. I did the same. I realized he had bowed his head and was hiding his own eyes behind me.
I heard him sigh, or was it a moan? I couldn’t tell. For one second the sound filled the universe; all the cries and laughter and singing; and something mournful from the depths of Earth—all this sound—was caught in Memnoch’s sigh.
Suddenly I felt his strong arms relaxed and releasing me.
I looked up, and in the midst of the flood of light I saw again the balustrade, and against it stood a single form.
It was a tall figure who stood with his hands on the railing, looking over it and down. This appeared to be a man. He turned around and looked at me and reached out to receive me.
His hair and eyes were dark, brownish, his face perfectly symmetrical and flawless, his gaze intense; and the grasp of his fingers very tight.
I drew in my breath. I felt my body in all its solidity and fragility as his fingers clung to me. I was on the verge of death. I might have ceased to breathe at that moment, or ceased to move with the commitment to life and might have died!
The being drew me towards himself, a light flooding from him that mingled with the light behind him and all around him, so his face grew brighter yet more distinct and more detailed. I saw the pores of his darkening golden skin, I saw the cracks in his lips, the shadow of the hair that had been shaved from his face.
And then he spoke loudly, pleadingly to me, in a heartbroken voice, a voice strong and masculine and perhaps even young.
“You would never be my adversary, would you? You wouldn’t, would you? Not you, Lestat, no, not you!”
My God.
In utter agony, I was torn out of His grip, out of His midst, and out of His milieu.
The whirlwind once again surrounded us. I sobbed and beat on Memnoch’s chest. Heaven was gone!
“Memnoch, let go of me! God, it was God!”
Memnoch tightened his grip, straining with all his force to carry me downwards, to make me submit, to force me to begin the descent.
We plummeted, that awful falling, which struck such fear in me that I couldn’t protest or cling to Memnoch or do anything except watch the swift currents of souls all around us ascending, watching, descending, the darkness corning again, everything growing dark, until suddenly we traveled through moist air, full of familiar and natural scents, and then came to a soft and soundless pause.
It was a garden again. It was still and beautiful. But it was Earth. I knew it. My earth; and it was no disappointment in its intricacy or scents or substance. On the contrary, I fell on the grass and let my fingers dig into the earth itself. I felt it soft and gritted under my fingernails. I sobbed. I could taste the mud.
The sun was shining down on us, both of us. Memnoch sat looking at me, his wings immense and then slowly fading, until we became two manlike figures; one prone and crying like a child, and the other a great Angel, musing and waiting, his hair a mane of gradually settling light.
“You heard what He said to me!” I cried. I sat up. My voice should have been deafening. But it seemed only loud enough to be perfectly understood. “He said, ‘You wouldn’t ever be my adversary!’ You heard Him! He called me by name.”
Memnoch was completely calm, and of course infinitely more seductive and enchanting in this pale angelic shape than ever he could have been as the Ordinary Man.
“Of course he called you by name,” he said, his eyes widening with emphasis. “He doesn’t want you to help me. I told you. I’m winning.”
“But what were we doing there! How could we get into Heaven and yet be his adversaries!”
“Come with me, Lestat, and be my lieutenant, and you can come and go there whenever you like.”
I stared at him in astonished silence.
“You mean this? Come and go there?”
“Yes. Anytime. As I told you. Don’t you know the Scriptures? I’m not claiming an authenticity for the fragments that remain, or even the original poetry, but of course you can come and go. You won’t be of that place until you are redeemed and in it. But you can certainly get in and out, once you’re on my side.”
I tried to realize what he was saying. I tried to picture again the galleries, the libraries, the long, long rows of books, and realized suddenly it had become insubstantial; the details were disappearing. I was retaining a tenth of what I’d beheld; perhaps even less. What I have described here in this book is what I could remember then and now. And there had been so much more!
“How is that possible, that He would let us into Heaven!” I said. I tried to concentrate on the Scriptures, something David had said once a long time ago, about the Book of Job, something about Satan flying around and God saying, almost casually, Where have you been? Some explanation of the bene ha elohim or the court of heaven—
“We are his children,” said Memnoch. “Do you want to hear how it all started, the entire true story of Creation and the Fall, or do you want to go back and just throw yourself into His arms?”
“What more is there!” I asked. But I knew. There was understanding of what Memnoch was saying. And there was also something required to get in there! I couldn’t just go, and Memnoch knew it. I had choices, yes, and they were these, either to go with Memnoch or return to the earth. But admission to Heaven was hardly automatic. The remark had been sarcastic. I couldn’t go back and throw myself in His arms.
“You’re right,” he said. “And you’re also very wrong.”
“I don’t want to see Hell!” I said suddenly. I drew myself up. I recoiled. I looked around us. This was a wild garden, this was my Savage Garden, of thorny vines and hunkering trees, of wild grass, and orchids clinging to the mossy knuckles of branches, of birds streaking high above through webs of leaves. “I don’t want to see Hell!” I cried. “I don’t want to, I don’t!…”
Memnoch didn’t answer. He seemed to be considering things. And then he said, “Do you want to know the why of all of it, or not? I was so sure you would want to know, you of all creatures. I thought you would want every little bit of information!”
“I do!” I cried. “Of course I want to know,” I said. “But I … I
don’t think I can.”
“I can tell you as much as I know,” he said gently, with a little shrug of his powerful shoulders.
His hair was smoother and stronger than human hair, the strands were perhaps thicker, and certainly more incandescent. I could see the roots of his hair at the top of his smooth forehead. His hair was tumbling soundlessly into some sort of order, or just becoming less disheveled. The flesh of his face was equally smooth and apparently pliant all over, the long, well-formed nose, the full and broad mouth, the firm line of the jaw.
I realized his wings were still there, but they had become almost impossible to see. The pattern of the feathers, layer after layer of feathers, was visible, but only if I squinted my eyes and tried to make out the details against something dark behind him, like the bark of the tree.
“I can’t think,” I said. “I see what you think of me, you think you’ve chosen a coward! You think you’ve made a terrible mistake. But I tell you, I can’t reason. I … I saw Him. He said, ‘You wouldn’t be my adversary!’ You’re asking me to do it! You took me to Him and away from Him.”
“As He Himself has allowed!” Memnoch said with a little rise to his eyebrows.
“Is that so?”
“Of course!” he answered.
“Then why did He plead with me! Why did He look that way!”
“Because He was God Incarnate, and God Incarnate suffers and feels things with His human form, and so He gave you that much of Himself, that’s all! Suffering! Ah, suffering!”
He looked to heaven and shook his head. He frowned a little, thoughtfully. His face in this form could not appear wrathful or twisted with any ugly emotion. Blake had seen into Heaven.
“But it was God,” I said.
He nodded, with his head to the side. “Ah, yes,” he said wearily, “the Living Lord.”
He looked off into the trees. He didn’t seem angry or impatient or even weary. Again, I didn’t know if he could. I realized he was listening to sounds in the soft garden, and I could hear them too.
I could smell things—animals, insects, the heady perfume of jungle flowers, those overheated, mutated blooms that a rain forest can nourish either in the depths or in its leafy heights. I caught the scent of humans suddenly!
There were people in this forest. We were in an actual place.
“There are others here,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. And now he smiled at me very tenderly. “You are not a coward. Shall I tell you everything, or simply let you go? You know now more than millions ever glimpse in their lifetimes. You don’t know what to do with that knowledge, or how to go on existing, or being what you are … but you have had your glimpse of Heaven. Shall I let you go? Or don’t you want to know why I need you so badly?”
“Yes, I do want to know,” I said. “But above all, more than anything else, I want to know how you and I can stand there side by side, adversaries, and how you can look as you look and be the Devil, and how … and how …” I laughed. “… and how I can look like I look and be the Devil I’ve been! That’s what I want to know. I have never in my whole existence seen the aesthetic laws of the world broken. Beauty, rhythm, symmetry, those are the only laws I’ve ever witnessed that seemed natural.
“And I’ve always called them the Savage Garden! Because they seemed ruthless and indifferent to suffering—to the beauty of the butterfly snared in the spiderweb! To the wildebeest lying on the veldt with its heart still beating as the lions come to lap at the wound in its throat.”
“Yes, how well I understand and respect your philosophy,” he said. “Your words are my words.”
“But I saw something more up there!” I said. “I saw Heaven. I saw the perfected Garden that was no longer Savage. I saw it!” I began to weep again.
“I know, I know,” he said, consoling me.
“All right.” I drew myself up again, ashamed. I searched in my pockets, found a linen handkerchief, pulled it out and wiped my face. The linen smelled like my house in New Orleans, where jacket and handkerchief both had been kept until sunset this night, when I’d taken them out of the closet and gone to kidnap Dora from the streets.
Or was it the same night?
I had no idea.
I pressed the handkerchief to my mouth. I could smell the scent of New Orleans dust and mold and warmth.
I wiped my mouth.
“All right!” I declared breathlessly. “If you haven’t become completely disgusted with me—”
“Hardly!” he said, as politely as David might have said.
“Then tell me the Story of Creation. Tell me everything. Just go on! Tell me! I.…”
“Yes …?”
“I have to know!”
He rose to his feet, shook the grass from his loose robe, and said:
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Now, we can truly begin.”
ELEVEN
“Let’s move through the forest as we talk,” he said. “If you don’t mind the walking.”
“No, not at all,” I said.
He brushed a little more of the grass from his garment, a fine spun robe that seemed neutral and simple, a garment that might have been worn either yesterday or a million years ago. His entire form was slightly bigger all over than mine, and bigger perhaps than that of most humans; he fulfilled every mythic promise of an angel, except that the white wings remained diaphanous, retaining their shape under some sort of cloak of invisibility, more it seemed for convenience than anything else.
“We’re not in Time,” he said. “Don’t worry about the men and the women in the forest. They can’t see us. No one here can see us, and for that reason I can keep my present form. I don’t have to resort to the dark devilish body which He thinks is appropriate for earthly maneuvers, or to the Ordinary Man, which is my own unobtrusive choice.”
“You mean you couldn’t have appeared to me on Earth in your angelic form?”
“Not without a lot of argument and pleading, and frankly I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s too overwhelming. It would have weighted everything too much in my favor. In this form, I look too inherently good. I can’t enter Heaven without this form; He doesn’t want to see the other form, and I don’t blame Him. And frankly, on Earth, it’s easiest to go about as the Ordinary Man.”
I stood up shakily, accepting his hand, which was firm and warm. In fact, his body seemed as solid as Roger’s body had seemed near the very end of Roger’s visitation. My body felt complete and entire and my own.
It didn’t surprise me to discover my hair was badly tangled. I ran a comb through it hastily for comfort, and brushed off my own clothes—the dark suit I had put on in New Orleans, which was full of tiny specks of dust, and some grass from the garden, but otherwise unharmed. My shirt was torn at the collar, as if I myself had ripped it open hastily in an effort to breathe. Otherwise, I was the usual dandy, standing amid a thick and verdant forest garden, which was not like anything I’d ever seen.
Even a casual inspection indicated that this was no rain forest, but something considerably less dense, yet as primitive.
“Not in Time,” I said.
“Well, moving through it as we please,” he said, “we are only a few thousand years before your time, if you must know it. But again, the men and women roaming here won’t see us. So don’t worry. And the animals can’t harm us. We are watchers here but we affect nothing. Come, I know this terrain by heart, and if you follow me, you’ll see we have an easy path through this wilderness. I have much to tell you. Things around us will begin to change.”
“And this body of yours? It’s not an illusion? It’s complete.”
“Angels are invisible, by nature,” he said. “That is, we are immaterial in terms of earth material, or the material of the physical universe, or however you would like to describe matter for yourself. But you were right in your early speculation that we have an essential body; and we can gather to ourselves sufficient matter from a whole variety of sources to create for ourse
lves a complete and functioning body, which we can later shatter and disperse as we see fit.”
We walked slowly and easily through the grass. My boots, heavy enough for the New York winter, found the uneven ground no problem at all.
“What I’m saying,” Memnoch continued, looking down at me—he was perhaps three inches taller—with his huge almond-shaped eyes—“is that this isn’t a borrowed body, nor is it strictly speaking a contrived body. It’s my body when surrounded and permeated with matter. In other words, it’s the logical result of my essence drawing to it all the various materials it needs.”
“You mean you look this way because you look this way.”
“Precisely. The Devilish body is a penance. The Ordinary Man is a subterfuge. But this is what I look like. There were angels like me throughout Heaven. Your focus was mainly on human souls in Heaven. But the angels were there.”
I tried to remember. Had there been taller beings, winged beings? I thought so, and yet I wasn’t certain. The beatific thunder of Heaven beat in my ears suddenly. I felt the joy, the safety, and above all the satisfaction of all those thriving in it. But angels, no, I had not noticed.
“I take my accurate form,” Memnoch continued, “when I am in Heaven, or outside of Time. When I am on my own, so to speak, and not bound to the earth. Other angels, Michael, Gabriel, any of those can appear in their glorified form on earth if they want to. Again, it would be natural. Matter being drawn to them by their magnetic force shapes them to look their most beautiful, the way God created them. But most of the time they don’t let this happen. They go about as Ordinary Men or Ordinary Women, because it’s simply much easier to do so. Continuously overwhelming human beings do not serve our purposes—neither our Lord’s nor mine.”
“And that is the question. What is the purpose? What are you doing, if you’re not evil?”
“Let me start with the Creation. And let me tell you right now that I know nothing of where God came from, or why, or how. No one knows this. The mystic writers, the prophets of Earth, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Egyptian—all recognized the impossibility of understanding the origin of God. That’s not really the question for me and never has been, though I suspect that at the end of Time we will know.”
