Contract with an Angel

by Andrew M. Greeley

  He bounded out of his car, rushed out into the fire zone and scooped up the two children. He had almost made it back to his car when he felt a massive blow to his back. He dumped the kids in the open door and then fell to the street.

  He felt blood pumping from his body. The world was turning dark and cold.

  All around him there were explosions of fire and light. Members of the two gangs were shooting at each other. Guns were exploding in their hands. Bodies everywhere.

  The seraphs were restoring order.

  A little too late but effective. At least they would save the kids and Peter.

  Then it was quiet. Gaby and Michael, wavering figures of light, were standing over him. So was Peter. All three were sobbing.

  “Too late,” Michael choked.

  “We didn’t know,” Gaby murmured.

  “It’s all right,” Neenan said. Or thought he said. He tried to smile and give the thumbs-up sign.

  He didn’t mind dying. Rather, he felt relieved. All the problems were over, all the mistakes irrelevant, all the complexities gone. He closed his eyes.

  He tried to say, “I love you,” but he didn’t know whether words came out.

  There was darkness.

  Then nothing at all.

  30

  Raymond Anthony Neenan lingered for some time, he did not know how long, between life and death. He knew that his family and friends were in his death room because occasionally he heard voices. He could identify only Anna Maria’s voice and pick out some of her words. Over and over she said, “I love you, Raymond. I love you so much. Please don’t leave us.”

  He tried on occasion to squeeze her hand, but was unsure that he had succeeded.

  There was also a woman doctor who said often, “He’s going to make it. We’re going to pull him through. He’s a strong man in good health. If we avoid infection, he’ll be fine.”

  Neenan knew better. His life was over. Soon he would know whether the seraphs were telling the truth about the Other. He was mildly curious. If there were no Other, no Occupant, no Someone-Else-Altogether, then he would never know.

  All he really cared about was getting it over with. Leave me alone and let me die, he tried to say, but naturally no one heard him.

  Then, finally, he died.

  He felt a gentle twist out of his body and then floated to the top of the room, just as Light in the Tunnel said he would. Interesting he thought.

  “We’re losing him,” the woman doctor screamed. “Damn it, he’s going!”

  He observed pandemonium in the intensive care room as doctors and nurses worked frantically over his body. Bells rang, electronic warnings beeped menacingly. Anna Maria was leading people in prayer. She and Jenny were clinging to one another, as were Vinny and Meg and Len. Norm and Joe were weeping behind them. In one corner, Michael and Gabriella watched with somber expressions. It’s all right, guys, he wanted to say; not your fault. Was that other couple Estelle and her husband? Odd that they should come. Behind Anna Maria were two lovely young women, early teens perhaps. Their faces were expressionless. Who were they?

  Don’t weep, guys. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right. I’m not afraid. I think I’m headed for the long tunnel and the figure in white. Occupant!

  “Gone!” the woman doctor said despairingly. “We’ve lost him.”

  That’s all right, Neenan tried to tell them, but they could not hear him. Then he floated out of the room, up through St. Luke—Presbyterian Hospital and out over the city of Chicago. Christmas tree lights already, red and green panels on the John Hancock observatory, the star suspended from the twin aerials. He must have hovered between life and death for a long time. For a moment he regretted all the Christmases he had wasted. Then he realized that the time for regrets was over.

  Chicago slipped away beneath him and he was in the long tunnel of the screenplay. Maybe they should have made the film after all. Well, too late now. No, that was wrong. They would make it.

  The tunnel seemed transparent. Outside he saw a vast and busy city, its people engaged in intense activity. The city was radiant in colors that seemed to fade periodically from red to violet and back again. Choirs sang (though not, he thought, the angel brats), musicians played, fountains and waterfalls sparkled and glowed. This city was like a city on earth but richer, fuller, more beautiful. If this indeed were heaven, was life in heaven like life on earth, only better?

  We might do worse, he thought, and wished that Anna Maria was with him to share his surprise. Foolish thought.

  Everyone was young and apparently happy. He drifted by GIs he had known in Alaska who had been killed later in Nam. They waved enthusiastically. Then a handsome young couple with broad grins who seemed to be cheering him. Who were they?

  Mom and Dad! Looking like they did in their wedding picture. Maybe now they could straighten things out. He had never seen the two of them grinning at the same time.

  The inhabitants of the city wore loose robes of many different colors and designs, robes that did not obscure the beauty of the bodies of both genders. Women were more attractive in heaven than on earth. Thank goodness, admiring attractive women still seemed possible.

  He glanced at his own body, now young and strong again. He was wearing a light black robe with gold zigzag stripes. Did the design mean anything? he wondered. Did it mark him as some sort of problem case who had to be watched carefully before he was let out of the tunnel and into the crowd in the city?

  He felt the need to exercise, to discharge the energy that was pent up in his apparently brand-new body. It had to be new, didn’t it? His old body was back in the intensive care room or probably on its way to the morgue by now. Maybe not all of it. The priest had suggested that some of the human body remained with the spirit when it departed, perhaps that slight twist he had experienced when he had left his body was the breaking free of something that the people here could turn into a new body.

  How did they figure out what kind of robe a new arrival should wear? They had a made good choice in his case. Did they have a file on him? Was he an entry in a massive database?

  Did they play basketball up here, if up was the right word? He would have to find out.

  What about human love? Anna Maria had said that she didn’t want to go to heaven if she could not make love with him. No, she had been more colloquial—she had said “screw.” He’d have to find out about that.

  As he walked down the tunnel, Neenan felt a surge of happiness. Peace, joy, laughter, took possession of his being. He had never known so much happiness. It was deeper, broader, higher than the emotions in the ecstatic experiences that had started so long ago on the flight from Washington to Chicago and had continued during his love affair with his wife. Yet it was neither abrupt nor fleeting and certainly not intrusive as had been his previous ecstasy. Rather he felt that joy, smooth and natural, had taken permanent possession of whatever of his mortal self that remained.

  No more worries, no more stress, no more fear. Maybe, he thought, this is the way we are supposed to live. Or the way we can live when we know that death is not the end.

  I’ll never go back to the old way of living, not even if I’m given a chance. The terrors of life are stupid. Why endure them? Anna Maria? The seraphs would take care of her. She would be with him soon and they would be happy together.

  Wouldn’t they?

  Were not his mother and father together?

  And were not many of the men and women who are strolling together through the sweet-smelling parks and gardens or rushing down the broad streets holding hands or walking arm in arm? Did not his parents have their arms around one another’s waists?

  Whatever form it took, human love certainly existed here and seemed to be intense. For now it was enough that he know that.

  Then the tunnel came to an end and the vast and dazzling globe of light waited for him, the light that the script they had rejected said ought to be here. The light was bright enough to be blinding, but it did not hurt his eyes. I
nside the light, waves of radiant energy swirled around like the storms of light he had seen in pictures of the planet Jupiter. As if from the center of the light there blazed streams of passionate love that made the most powerful love he had ever known—the love between him and Anna Maria—seem weak and unimportant.

  “Occupant,” he whispered.

  “Someone-Else-Altogether … . Welcome, Raymond Anthony,” a rich alto voice said with an amused laugh. “You never thought you would enter this place as a hero, even as a martyr, did you?”

  “I’m not a martyr.”

  The Voice laughed again in gentle amusement. “Perhaps not by the Church’s definition, but here I make the rules.”

  The Voice was thunder, but tender thunder; roaring waves, but waves that touched the beach softly; wild waterfalls, but falls that also bubbled like a brook; screaming winds, but winds that were as light as the first zephyr of spring.

  “Are you really a woman?” he asked.

  The fragrance around the Voice combined every garden in the world, but did not overwhelm. The music that accompanied her words sounded like Mozart, not Beethoven, played on the most delicate of instruments. The taste she seemed to radiate was of the best chocolate ice cream with raspberry sauce and whipped cream. Neenan was aware of all of these sensual experiences but realized that they were only a hint of the reality he had encountered.

  “Both men and women in your world are metaphors for me. In your case it seemed better to disclose at this time the womanly metaphor, since so much of your life and your salvation has been related to women.”

  “Metaphors, metaphors.” Maybe one shouldn’t argue with God, but she seemed to enjoy it.

  “How else can limited creatures know the unlimited?”

  “I take your point … . You laugh a lot, don’t you?”

  “If you’re God, you have to laugh.”

  She seemed to treasure that line, because her laugh after it seemed quite self-satisfied. If you were God, presumably you had every reason to be self-satisfied.

  “Do you weep too?”

  “One of the reasons I take particular delight in you, Ray, is that you are so very quick and clever with the right questions. Certainly I weep. Does not every parent weep when a beloved child suffers? At this moment I laugh with you and weep with those you have left behind.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “It’s one of my little tricks,” she said with yet another rich laugh.

  “You sound a little like Miriam. Or should I say, Miriam sounded a little like you?”

  “Either way. We both are pleased. Her job, as you realized, was to reveal my maternal love.”

  “I understand. Well, I think I do.”

  “I rejoice that I finally possess you as I have always desired and weep for the temporary pain that my full possession of you causes your other lovers. I will wipe away their tears, that I promise you, because I desire them too.”

  “You want to possess me?”

  “You have it wrong, Ray. I already possess you. And you of course possess me. Love, as a very wise human once said, is not so much the desire to possess as the desire to be possessed.”

  “You don’t mind my asking all these questions?”

  “Certainly not. You amuse me greatly.”

  “Twelve-year-old boy.”

  “Was she not a wonderful gift?”

  “The best. We will be together again?”

  “Certainly, Ray. Why should you need to ask? I create because I love stories, especially love stories. Like all romantics I delight in happy endings.”

  “You’re a romantic?”

  “What else do I seem?”

  “You need us then?”

  Neenan was tense, anxious, excited, something like his state on the wedding night with Annie. Was God as vulnerable as Annie?

  “Only theologians who have read too much Greek philosophy ask that question. Is it not evident that I want my creatures, even more than they want me? That in my own way I am as vulnerable as your good wife was on your first night together?”

  “I guess so.”

  There was a pause as though the Voice was sizing him up, preparing for the next phase of their conversation. Or perhaps merely giving him the impression that she was sizing him up.

  “You noticed your parents when you came through the tunnel?”

  “Yes … What has happened to them?”

  “They are struggling through their purgatory. They are trying to understand where their love story went wrong and then to set it right. Purgatory, you see, is not a place distinct from this one, rather it is an activity in which humans engage as part of being here. It is most exciting and most painful in that they must accept their shame.”

  “You make them do that?”

  “No. Rather I make it possible for them to do it, and of course they want to do it. I intervene to limit the amount of time they can expend on each encounter. Their pain is pleasurable—as was your impressive reconciliation with poor Estelle—but they must pursue reconciliation at a reasonable pace.”

  “My parents with me?”

  “In due course. It will be easy for you and very difficult for them. However, the reconciliation you sought in vain on earth will come eventually.”

  “Wonderful!”

  Another pause. “You were very responsive to my messengers’ promptings.”

  “They’re good people.”

  “Oh, yes. A little too intense at times.”

  What was she about to spring?

  “It is most difficult to explain to you, Ray, how much I enjoy you. Those very characteristics that your wife and other women found appealing are very attractive to me. You are a human in which strength and tenderness are nicely combined, even if it required considerable effort toward the end of your life to work out the balance.”

  “Thank you.”

  Whose effort, he wondered, mine or yours?

  “Unlike the seraphs I read thoughts. You are now wondering what I’m driving at?”

  She was like Anna Maria, as well as Miriam. That was nice.

  “You don’t have to read my thoughts to know that.”

  “There is but one problem, you see.”

  Here it comes, he thought. “And that is?”

  “You came too early!”

  “Huh?”

  “I will now have to explain how I tell my stories. It will be a little hard to understand, because you are not God. As time goes on, you will understand me better: that is one of the great delights of this place. But never perfectly … . Is this acceptable?”

  “I’ll make a virtue out of necessity and say that it is.”

  Neenan felt himself inundated by an intoxicating stream of love.

  “I do love you, so much,” she said with something like a sigh. Something like Anna Maria’s sigh.

  “I love you too, though it seems presumptuous to say that.”

  “Not at all. That’s what you’re supposed to do and say. Like all storytellers, you see, I am an empiricist, a pragmatist, I play it by ear as I tell my stories. Since I deprive no one of their freedom, my characters and the forces of nature in which they live may choose not to follow my most preferred scenario. Therefore I must fall back on other and less preferred scenarios. In the end I see that their freedom leads to my happy endings, but it often requires, how shall I say it, considerable dexterity on my part.”

  “No, I don’t understand it, but I guess I’m not supposed to.”

  “You were not supposed to die in that gunfight.”

  “Oh, oh,” he murmured.

  “The fight activated a scenario that was far down on my list of preferences. The poor seraphs blame themselves because they love you so much. It was, however, patently not their fault.”

  “And not your fault either?”

  “I do not deny people their freedom. I simply stand by with other scenarios to work my way around their freedom.”

  “I don’t see how it makes any difference. I was go
ing to die anyway.”

  The voice sighed loudly. “No, my beloved, as a point of fact you were not, not yet.”

  “But the seraphs …”

  “Were warned to tell you that you should straighten out your life lest you die in three months. Perhaps they misunderstood. It is only very rarely that we establish such a scenario.”

  That was pretty thin, he thought. “Lest?”

  “I admit that it was thin. Scenarios get thin sometimes. It was necessary to scare you in order that you might not die, as one very unpleasant but highly probable scenario would have worked out. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as you may have heard. We avoided that less than preferred scenario and seem to have stumbled into another. I know you cannot understand me, dearest one, but believe that all was done out of love for you and respect for the freedom of all involved.”

  Another thick wave of love embraced him.

  “I love you too much,” he said, “to argue with you.”

  “You will always argue with me, Ray. That is in your nature, the way I made it.”

  “All right, what’s happening here?”

  “When less preferred scenarios develop which lead to a death before the more preferred time, on occasion we give the subject a chance to return.”

  “I read the screenplay. Like the woman in it, I want to stay here with you. There’s no one back on earth—if that’s the right geography—that needs me like her family needed her.”

  “That’s not altogether true.”

  “You’re going to tell me who needs me?”

  “Naturally. You noticed those two adolescent women with the blank faces at the side of your death bed.”

  “Yeah. Who were they?”

  “The twin daughters Anna Maria is carrying in her womb. She does not know yet that she is pregnant. When she finds out, she will be very happy because they are the enduring result of the love between the two of you during the last days of your life, the result indeed of that lovely little incident on the beach.”

  “Oh.” What do you say when God springs that on you? “Wonderful!” he said, testing the word and finding that it fit. “I wish I could be there to take care of them. Now I’ll never know them … not on earth anyway.”